Between sea and shore, where tides write their stories in the language of ebb and flow, I found myself drawn to explore a different kind of migration. Here, rendered in oil pastel’s unforgiving honesty, a crab ventures beyond its ancestral territory into a landscape of human detritus transformed by intention into something approaching sacred geometry.

The shelves, laden with glass bottles, become both obstacle and opportunity—each vessel a prism catching and fracturing sunlight into countless possibilities. The crab, creature of twilight zones and tidal margins, navigates this crystalline forest with the deliberate grace of an explorer charting unknown territories. Its claws, evolved for the crush and scuttle of intertidal life, here become tools of delicate negotiation with these fragile sentinels of human presence.

There’s something profound in this juxtaposition—how the hard-shelled pragmatism of the crab’s form creates unexpected dialogue with the ethereal nature of light-filled glass. Each bottle becomes its own small universe, holding not just space but captured light, transformed and multiplied until the ordinary shelving unit becomes an altar to possibility.

Working in oil pastel allowed me to explore the way light fractures and reforms, how it pools in the curves of glass and slides across the crab’s carapace like liquid possibility. The medium’s resistance to perfect blending mirrors the slight awkwardness of the crab in this manufactured environment—each mark a testament to the beautiful imperfection of crossing boundaries.

This piece joins its siblings in my ongoing exploration of these unlikely encounters—each drawing a meditation on adaptation, on finding grace in spaces we were never meant to inhabit. Through this series, these crustacean wanderers become avatars for all of us who have ever found ourselves navigating unfamiliar terrain, finding beauty in the very alienation that defines our journey.

In the end, perhaps that’s what draws me back to these scenarios—how they speak to the eternal dance between belonging and displacement, between the wild and the curated, between what we inherit and what we dare to explore. Each crab, each bottle, each play of light becomes part of a larger story about finding wonder in the spaces between our expected territories.