ENTER THE WORLD OF MARY JAMESON AND PREPARE FOR A DEEP DIVE, a bottomless plunge into nature and science; creativity and culture; history and spirituality—and art.

Jameson’s Saltwater Studio, on the outskirts of Newport, is a working artist’s dream. Housed in an industrial building, it has high ceilings, a garage door to move bulky materials in and out, waist-high tables, bar stools, an office area, and lots of room for storage, where lumber and other raw materials for framing are neatly stacked, at the ready to showcase creative output. It’s also a gallery, retail shop, and learning center. It’s a hub of activity, offering sales of her framed prints and wood blocks, jewelry, stationery, dinnerware, and other home decorations.

On a sunny Saturday, a crowd of a dozen souls, myself among them, turns out for her hands-on workshop to learn how to press marine algae into collages.

Each marine botanical workshop participant is passionate about the coastal environment in ways that become apparent as we get to know each other. Some of us are personal friends of Jameson, eager to learn from such a talented and experienced artist; others, like me, are sailors. There are also scientists, nature lovers, hobbyists, and outdoor swimmers. We open the packages containing the reusable, portable pressing kits she’s perfected over a decade of trial and error, and in we go.

“I have everyone do two collages,” she says,  “because there’s a bit of anxiety doing something new. Little by little, you’ll understand it better. Everybody will be able to make pressings that look like something you can frame. There is no right or wrong; all the collages look good. You get the anxiety out after the first one, and then you see that you can do it all day.”

From two shallow tubs near our worktables, we use chopsticks and other thin, long probes to draw shiny, drippy, clumpy strands and tufts out of the seawater, then into individual basins containing about an inch of water. Suspended in air, hanging like spaghetti, the red, green and brown varieties of seaweed don’t look particularly inspiring—and Jameson is prepared for that assessment.

“You need to see the seaweed in its beauty in the water, where it’s fluffed out,” she tells us. “There, you can see the shapes and colors. Take time, poke around—you’ll see different textures and colors. If something looks brown or dark, it will look great next to greens and reds. Don’t discount anything—you see things better when you mix the different tones and textures.”

Back at the worktables, using our hands, paint brushes, toothpicks, tweezers, more sea water, anda little glue, we spread strands of Irish moss, sea lettuce, rockweed, sugar kelp (whose nicknames in-clude Devil’s Apron), feathery chenille weed, Corallina officinalis, and laver (of which nori is a variety) over watercolor paper in an arrangement that suits our individual inclinations.

Jameson checks our work, moving from table to table. After repeated blotting and pressing, a process that Jameson has engineered to make so simple that it can accommodate just about any misstep, and a two-week drying period beneath heavy items such as books, each of us will have created two pieces of marine art worthy of framing. Once the questions and exclamations and oohs and ahhs have settled into the silence of concentrated effort and total submersion in our task, I start to believe making art is possible, even for me.

Jameson is not the only one to take an interest in seaweed. In the U.S., the National Sea Grant’s Seaweed Hub State of the States Report of 2024 records that seaweed farming in 11 states has emerged significantly over the last decade, in the Northeast, the Northwest, and Hawaii. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it has become the country’s fastest-growing aquaculture sector, prized for its potential environmental and economic benefits.

Seaweed also turns up in other familiar and surprising ways: Sweaters are sewn from seaweed-based fibers, and smoothies are blended from concoctions that include everything from dried dulse flakes to Irish moss gel and kelp.

We also unwittingly eat foods that contain seaweed—ice cream among them, where it acts as a stabilizer, keeping the treat from getting icy—and varied cuisines and cookbooks are based upon it. Seaweed byproducts are in shampoo, skin cream, and toothpaste. It’s also well regarded as a nutrient-rich natural fertilizer for farmers and gardeners.

There’s more: a new board game on the scene is “Phycoverse: A Game of Algae Adventure,” produced by the Algae Foundation. Jameson is one of its artistic contributors.

Beyond board games, Jameson’s embrace of her artistic genre extends to seaweed-themed events. She attends symposiums led by seaweed scientists, known as phycologists, and has assisted in outreach programs and classes led by URI marine sciences Ph.D. candidate Rebecca Venezia.

Jameson’s methods and work are sought out by scientists as an aesthetic bridge between two disciplines.

“It takes away the stress,” Jameson says. “It rounds out their education, and it helps people feel more comfortable. It adds another perspective—less in the lab and on the page, more visual and beautiful.”

According to Venezia, the goal of the events Jameson has participated in is to help the general public appreciate that seaweed is far more than a stinky, rotting, beach-flea-ridden weed. On the day I attend Jameson’s workshop, Venezia also participates for the first time, and she helps Jameson answer questions as they arise, while making art.

“Most people see seaweed dry on the beach and that’s not the best way to see it,” Venezia says. “When you see it in water, like in the tubs at this workshop, it’s absolutely gorgeous.”

When Venezia is out in the field, she believes that helping people identify seaweed, learn individual species names, and exploring it in nature results in a better appreciation of the role it plays in the ecosystem of the bay and understanding its importance.

Way before Instagram, seaweed was trending. Its popularity just looked different back then—really different.

In her workshop handout package, Jameson stresses to participants that the collection of seaweed is protected by law in Rhode Island.

The clause she provided paper copies of, ensuring the constitutional right of Rhode Island citizens to gather seaweed, was approved by voters in 1986. Yet it only skims the surface of a prodigious reference library and early 20th-century scrapbooks and dioramas Jameson has acquired over the decade. She generously lends some works to me so I can bone up on seaweed, and I dig in.

Among the works is Mary Howard’s 1846 album of British seaweed, Ocean Flowers and Their Teachings. Howard’s work emphasized the perspective of the seaweed upon its gatherers, and how spending time in nature is a link to the divine, a concept that Jameson, who considers herself more spiritual than religious, concurs with.

“It slows me down,” she says. “My days are busy, and I know I’ve got to fit collecting in when it’s low tide, when it’s great to see things in the water. Then I come back to my studio and do workshops.”

How Jameson arrived at this creative and personal period of her life is an odyssey of rich dimensions. It’s a story that percolates along with the expected twists and turns of a large Navy family with roots in the Ocean State, moving around the country, then coming back.

While Jameson considers herself a Rhode Islander, her father’s military postings sent them to various places, including Key West, Florida, which led her to earn a degree in graphic design and illustration at the University of Miami. She later signed on as a mate aboard a charter sailboat doing a stint in the Caribbean.

A few years later, she returned to the United States and moved to the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, taking a job in a fine art services and portrait framing business. It was there she met her husband, Dwight Jameson, the owner. In addition to helping her husband’s business, she worked in the corporate world, handling fine art displays and exhibits, and became a certified art appraiser.

Family ties and a desire to be close to nature led the couple to buy a home and rent a studio in Newport. They found a house, and what is now Saltwater Studio, right around the corner. Shortly after, they welcomed their son, Kieran, into the world.

While taking toddler Kieran on walks around Third Beach, in Middletown, she’d notice healthy amounts of seaweed. It was 2014, and that year, the Newport Historical Society hosted the fascinating exhibit “Flowers from the Ocean,” which included scrapbooks of Aquidneck Island seaweed specimens produced by summer visitors and residents in the 1800s. She decided to attend.

“I had never seen it used decoratively before,” Jameson recalls. “It was intriguing, and I was taking my son who was small to Third Beach to look at the seaweed and so, I said, let me learn this technique.”

And the rest, as they say, is history.

A couple of weeks after the workshop, I lift the collages I made out from under the pile of hefty reference books Jameson lent me. I can certainly mount each of them—they are interesting-looking and varied. I take the measurements of the two watercolor sheets and plan a trip to a local arts and crafts shop.

I may not be an artist, but, inspired by our coast, I have learned to create art from the sea.