Painting Scroll For the Whales

Kate Farrington, Painting Scroll for the Whales (2025), 44 ft, double-sided, underwater, painting scroll for the whales, by Kate Farrington. Fabric paint on fabric. 4' x 44', for the Goetemann Environmental Installation Artist Residency at the Ocean Alliance, Rocky Neck, Gloucester, MA. Installation view: Festival launch at Expedition Oceanbourn: Final Convivium, Tarr & Wonson Paint Factory at the Ocean Alliance in Rocky Neck, MA, September 28, 2025.

Concept: Painting Scroll for Whales (2025) is part of a speculative fabulation project of Kate Farrington and the art collective, Ocean School Collective (OSC) devoted to promoting a new environmental ethic called “ocean thinking” to expand the cultural sphere to include the world of whales. The scroll was made during the Goetemann Environmental Installation Artist Residency at the Ocean Alliance, which is the group founded by Roger Payne and who is credited with discovering that humpback whales are singing songs. Ocean Alliance is one of the world’s oldest whale science and ocean conservation organizations based in Gloucester, Massachusetts, U.S.A., and the residency is sponsored by Rocky Neck Art Colony, one of the oldest art colonies in the United States. The scroll is made as an offering to the whales. It contains the symbols of the whale song notations that appeared on Science Magazine in 1979, as well as sigils (magical symbols) from OSC embedded as bubble-net technology on one side, and camouflaged as jellyfish on the other. The scroll is a communication interface with the whales, designed to be read underwater.