Sylvia Grace Borda’s artistic practice is centred on the relationship between observation, recording, and sharing environmental knowledge systems in order to inform global audiences about eco-system challenges. Borda in recent is employing a range of conceptual and digital tools to create artworks that map Pacific ocean shorelines and their changing uncertainty in attempts to discern and describe this interface between land and water. She was invited by curator, Khaled Ramadan, to present her Pacific tidal eco-artworks for presentation (see below) at the 61st Venice Biennale - Nauru National Pavilion.
Blanketed by Oceans
Dye sublimation image on fabric
2 panels (122cm x 146 cm) accompanied by C-41 prints
2026
Blanketed by Oceans
Dye sublimation image on fabric
2 panels (122cm x 146 cm) accompanied by C-41 prints
2026
Blanketed by Oceans questions a Western ambivalence in defining or perceiving the Pacific Ocean as more than a singular mass, rather than as an entity interconnected, fluid, and ecologically diverse.
Borda’s visualisation of Pacific Ocean shorelines addresses this ambivalence in a playful installation using blankets as an allegorical canvas. This portrayal has a two-fold approach. Firstly, Borda invites viewers to wrap themselves in the ocean blankets, hybridizing the boundaries of the critical role of oceans as a vital ecosystem covering more than 70% of the earth’s surface. Secondly, the ocean as a tangible form supports the activation of audiences towards responsibility of care and stewardship. In Blanketed by Oceans, Borda subtly suggests that although the North Pacific and South Pacific oceans are visually and ecologically different they are intrinsically connected from Nauru to Nanaimo, Canada.
Shoreline Debris
12 Silver print photograms
20cm x 25cm, 2026
Borda’s visualisation of Pacific Ocean shorelines addresses this ambivalence in a playful installation using blankets as an allegorical canvas. This portrayal has a two-fold approach. Firstly, Borda invites viewers to wrap themselves in the ocean blankets, hybridizing the boundaries of the critical role of oceans as a vital ecosystem covering more than 70% of the earth’s surface. Secondly, the ocean as a tangible form supports the activation of audiences towards responsibility of care and stewardship. In Blanketed by Oceans, Borda subtly suggests that although the North Pacific and South Pacific oceans are visually and ecologically different they are intrinsically connected from Nauru to Nanaimo, Canada.
Shoreline Debris
12 Silver print photograms
20cm x 25cm, 2026
Shoreline Debris are visual aide de memoir photograms of seaweeds and algae, signifiers of the ocean’s rapidly changing health and its tensions impacting shorelines. The photogram process was chosen as an early form of photographic image-making where objects are placed on a light sensitive paper and leave a shadow or silhouette after exposure. This is a symbolic process where Borda’s specimens are washed ashore as decaying flora pulled from ocean and shallow tidal pools, representing seaweed, seagrasses, red and brown algae collected from Nanaimo coastlines, the ancestral and unceded Territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation. In ideal conditions, shoreline kelp and seaweeds provide ecological habitats for small crab, starfish and molluscs, and even for other algae, helping with oxygen cycles and slowing shoreline erosion by decreasing the impacts of water motion and currents across the environment. Climate warming and high impact tidal waves from storm surges break down algae and root systems and they are swept away in volumes from ocean beds to swell and decay on beaches. Borda’s capturing of shoreline debris stands in contrast to plastics and discarded human-made waste on coastal shores, but it is equally as potent as a marker of near irreversible change. While beauty of form is recorded in Borda’s intimate photograms, these flora are receding between light and shadow and uncertain ecological futures.
Intertidal cantos I-XXIV
Digital film vignettes, 2026
Intertidal cantos I-XXIV
Digital film vignettes, 2026
In Intertidal cantos I-XXIV invisible clam cayons to creatures from amphipods and starfish colonies slowly appear before audiences’ eyes – each filmic scene captured in real time exposes viewers to the pace and sounds of Pacific ocean shore life during tidal changes. Borda’s Intertidal cantos are panoramas documented in a continuous take of sound and image. They hint at transition as Borda intimately films the flows that submerge and expose flora and shoreline creatures across ordinary time. Her cantos reveal shorelines as places beyond sand and seaweed that have their own resonance, motion, and inhabitants. Rocks shelter crabs, fish and clams, while providing a habitat for barnacles, sea anemones, mussels, and algae. These are dynamic places where change is constant in rhythm with nature, and often out of synch with adjacent human activity.
Borda’s films allude to the otherness of human activity through audio – the engines of commuter floatplanes audibly hum in the background. This ominous sound is a backdrop reinforcing that life at the tidal’s edge is far from an idealised canto. These remarkable microworlds where seashore creatures eat, thrive and dwell are caught in between oceanic climatic and anthropogenic changes. Through her cantos, Borda challenges viewers on how we can be better allies to ocean shoreline frontiers – knowing that these environments while beautiful also remain critically vulnerable. Is it not time that we see and feel from the perspective of these tidal shorelines in order to find sustainable pathways?
Photographic histories and artist’s intentions
Borda’s alertness to the agency of the ecological and human worlds in which we share is squarely situated in her frames of reference to early and contemporary imaging systems and interpretations. In the 1830s William Henry Fox Talbot, fore-father of photography, proposed photography as an alternative way of recording the natural world “without relying upon an artist’s direct hand.” Talbot began experimenting with light-sensitive chemical solutions to create a camera-less technique that developed into his “photogenic drawing” or photogram process in 1834.
In a similar nod to Talbot, Borda is curious to use her records to enable shorelines to be their own authors and to reveal their own traces and sounds across her media. From Borda’s photograms she moves beyond the historical relationship of documenting shoreline diversity, as found in Anna Atkins “Photographs of British Algae (1843-1852)“, to activate awareness about pending changes in oceanic shorelines experienced by humans and shoreline inhabitants alike. Whereas Atkins algae were collected from an early Anthropogenic era of oceans to illustrate classification systems and help identify new algae species, Borda’s work is a catalogue of the vulnerability of ocean tidal flora at present and their changes.
What's next? Borda has always pursued notions of the absence and presence of subjects within the optical field. For her upcoming 2027 residency at ArtEngine’s Futurelab in Ottawa, Canada, she will continue to explore Pacific intertidal shorelines, traditional and unceded territories of Coast Salish Nations, through contemporary image-making, next using immersive video and VR technologies. This series of work builds on her pioneering art process of creating staged dioramas of urban-rural land change embedded as panoramas in Google Street View. Her new spatial time-based works will capture Pacific shorelines with a cast of seaweed, starfishes and other creatures directly captured in front of the camera, with the Pacific ocean as co-author to the narrative before us. Borda’s aspiration is to accelerate a visual understanding of shorelines as an interface between ocean and land and to help activate stewardship of these vitally critical nature-human systems. These new series will be shown and toured by ArtEngine in Winter 2027.
Borda’s films allude to the otherness of human activity through audio – the engines of commuter floatplanes audibly hum in the background. This ominous sound is a backdrop reinforcing that life at the tidal’s edge is far from an idealised canto. These remarkable microworlds where seashore creatures eat, thrive and dwell are caught in between oceanic climatic and anthropogenic changes. Through her cantos, Borda challenges viewers on how we can be better allies to ocean shoreline frontiers – knowing that these environments while beautiful also remain critically vulnerable. Is it not time that we see and feel from the perspective of these tidal shorelines in order to find sustainable pathways?
Photographic histories and artist’s intentions
Borda’s alertness to the agency of the ecological and human worlds in which we share is squarely situated in her frames of reference to early and contemporary imaging systems and interpretations. In the 1830s William Henry Fox Talbot, fore-father of photography, proposed photography as an alternative way of recording the natural world “without relying upon an artist’s direct hand.” Talbot began experimenting with light-sensitive chemical solutions to create a camera-less technique that developed into his “photogenic drawing” or photogram process in 1834.
In a similar nod to Talbot, Borda is curious to use her records to enable shorelines to be their own authors and to reveal their own traces and sounds across her media. From Borda’s photograms she moves beyond the historical relationship of documenting shoreline diversity, as found in Anna Atkins “Photographs of British Algae (1843-1852)“, to activate awareness about pending changes in oceanic shorelines experienced by humans and shoreline inhabitants alike. Whereas Atkins algae were collected from an early Anthropogenic era of oceans to illustrate classification systems and help identify new algae species, Borda’s work is a catalogue of the vulnerability of ocean tidal flora at present and their changes.
What's next? Borda has always pursued notions of the absence and presence of subjects within the optical field. For her upcoming 2027 residency at ArtEngine’s Futurelab in Ottawa, Canada, she will continue to explore Pacific intertidal shorelines, traditional and unceded territories of Coast Salish Nations, through contemporary image-making, next using immersive video and VR technologies. This series of work builds on her pioneering art process of creating staged dioramas of urban-rural land change embedded as panoramas in Google Street View. Her new spatial time-based works will capture Pacific shorelines with a cast of seaweed, starfishes and other creatures directly captured in front of the camera, with the Pacific ocean as co-author to the narrative before us. Borda’s aspiration is to accelerate a visual understanding of shorelines as an interface between ocean and land and to help activate stewardship of these vitally critical nature-human systems. These new series will be shown and toured by ArtEngine in Winter 2027.