Sierra Nelson photographed during Octopus Week at the Seattle Aquarium, February 2019. STEVE KORN
Sierra Nelson is a poet and a performer who has a longtime love affair with science and sea creatures. It began with her summertime visits to the tide pools near her grandmother’s house in Port Angeles. The misty aquatic wonderland was a sharp contrast to her early childhood of catching crickets and lizards in the sagebrush deserts of Nevada, where she lived until moving to the Pacific Northwest for high school.
She left again to go to college at Vassar, where she studied biology, although she ended up dropping it for English because she didn’t like the class structure of the science track. Yet she has always found ways to work the forms and methodologies of science into her artistic practice.
