How often do you think about dying? It’s an uncomfortable question, yet actively contemplating our inevitable demise might be the sharpest way to wake up to life’s fundamental truth: everything is temporary. In my practice, I document forms that are already in the process of disappearing; holding them in a delicate balance between a preserved archive and natural erosion.
For a recent feature with LoHi Magazine, we explored a space where human grief, structural design, and marine ecology permanently tangle: Neptune Memorial Reef. It’s an underwater columbarium where cremated human remains are blended into concrete to construct monumental archways, columns, and statues. Over time, the ocean claims these memorials, transforming monuments of loss into a living, thriving sanctuary for coral.
The feature unfolded across two radically different lenses. Above water, we shot an editorial pool sequence styled by Juan Betancourt in a custom Lisu Vega dress. Posing as a stylized goddess of death felt like a surreal rehearsal for the dive itself, as a hyper-curated, theatrical confrontation with our own impermanence.
The Performance Above, The Reality Below
But 40 feet below the surface, the theater dropped away. Descending into Neptune carries a quiet, heavy melancholy. This site holds deep personal resonance for me; it was the very first place I ever dove, and the raw texture of this underwater city directly inspired by my 2020 exhibition, Future Pacific. Returning years later with advanced photogrammetry gear felt less like a standard research trip and more like a necessary ritual.
Developed as a structural response to Miami’s dwindling burial space, Neptune Memorial Reef turns concrete, humanity's favorite "permanent" building material, into a substrate for memory and ecological renewal.
There is a fascinating regional landscape to this choice. Florida maintains an unusually high cremation rate of roughly 70%. In a coastal metropolis built on porous limestone, choosing a "death plot" that cultivates new marine habitats instead of consuming scarce land above sea level is an entirely radical approach to environmental legacy. Here, death literally gives rise to new life.
Equipped with underwater scanning rigs, my goal was to generate the first comprehensive digital 3D models of these submerged architectures. To scan underwater, you must commit to a slow, methodical ritual. Photogrammetry requires swimming systematic, repetitive grids over the monuments, capturing thousands of high-resolution, overlapping images that we later stitch together in the studio to build mathematically accurate models.
Archiving the Disappearing
Digital preservation feels like an attempt to stop time, yet every scan is merely a snapshot of growth, or decline. There is a quiet melancholy baked into the process. A 3D model doesn't tell the story of a full life cycle; it captures a single, fleeting fragment held briefly against time. We are archiving the monument at the exact moment the sea is claiming it.
Seeing how coral colonizes names, how plaques slowly erode under sea currents, and how structures become soft, living substrates is a masterclass in letting go.
The Paradox of the Scan
This tension between preservation and transience is the heartbeat of my practice. In our 2020 exhibition Future Pacific, seven massive architectural structures were clad in 15,000 pounds of raw, unfired clay corals. Clay is an ancient medium that carries human history, but by leaving it unfired, the sculptures were allowed to dry, crack, and slowly turn to dust over the course of the show.
But raw clay, like the reef, is never truly gone. With water, it can be rehydrated and molded once more. My work down at Neptune Reef, at Vizcaya, and within the Everglades reminds us that systems collapse when conditions change. Acknowledging this vulnerability creates value.
These 3D models will eventually live in my growing digital "Library of Tools," waiting to be translated back into physical clay structures in the studio. They stand as a testament to a Miami that was, is, and might be, reminding us that in a landscape this fragile, loss and transformation are never opposites. They are the exact same process.
The full feature, The Shape of What Doesn’t Last, includes words by Catherine Crotty and can be found in the 05 print issue of LoHi Magazine.
All digital render images by Lauren Shapiro
All Pool images by Phoebe Fitz
All Ocean images by Camilla Smith
Styling by Juan Betancourt