2026 Spring Semester
University of California, Berkeley
Imperfectly Surveyed is a semester-long course that traverses the San Joaquin River from headwaters to the San Francisco Bay working with papermaking as a medium to engage river currents, sediment, histories and possible futures. During the semester, the course visits three locations to work in-situ with local partners. The course is also part of the ESPM program at UC Berkeley and launching three years of ongoing work to develop a series of paper, a suite of wooden boats and public programming. Imperfectly Surveyed includes lectures, workshops, archival research, mapping, oral history transmission, audio recording and writing.
2026 Winter & Spring
San Rafael, Marin County, California
Situated along the San Rafael Canal, an engineered tidal waterway that once flowed as a creek, this field study weaves together research, poetics, and design. Through archival inquiry, material experimentation, and community listening, the San Rafael Study exlores the confluence where the built environment and the San Francisco Bay’s estuary meet in uneasy exchange. The study seeks to uncover how colonial histories and urban development have obscured the ecological knowledge of the local land/seascape and severed our deep connection to the Bay. Drawing on Futurefarmers’ sustained engagement with boats as moving laboratories for civic imagination, this study situates boat-making and small craft as ways to reimagine our shared relationship with the Bay from that of vulnerability to agency and metabolic resilience.
San Rafael Canal
Physical sites and lines of inquiry are recorded and documented in a series of guidebooks, capturing observations, translations, methods, mediums, instructions, and so on. Alongside the vessel producing a layered resource, the books act as both field journals and creative atlas, interlinking ecologies and cultural fields serving as a resource for further research and experimentation.
2027 March 10 to June 10
Marin Museum of Contemporary Art
San Rafael, California
Within Becoming Estuarine, the boat is conceived as both tool and metaphor–a way of translating research, poetics, and site-specific knowledge into form. Its design, materials, and methods remain open, emerging from currents, migrations, upwellings, turbidity, histories, and futures of the San Francisco Bay Estuary. The vessel is a prototype for experimentation, a modest craft that floats between inquiry and action, allowing us to inhabit, move with, listen to the estuary, and imagine new relationships with water.