Description:
The Tipsy Turtle is a coastal talisman crafted with both whimsy and reverence—a creature cobbled together from time, tide, and a whisper of precolonial memory. Its shell, once part of a living oyster feasted on by the Lenape people centuries ago, bears the layered grooves of age and fire. Onto this sacred remnant, the artist has affixed flippers and a head made from green sea glass, softened by decades of surf, glinting now like armor glazed in laughter.

Tilted just off-kilter, its gaze upward and posture leaning ever so slightly askew, the turtle appears to have just emerged from the surf—or a long, contemplative journey—ready to share a secret but forgetting the punchline. It’s that hint of imbalance, the gentle absurdity, that gives the piece its name and its soul.

The green of the glass recalls the vibrancy of marsh grass and ocean bottles, its transparency both shielding and revealing. The shell is mottled and fossilized, a physical memory of estuarine bounty long before docks or ferries scarred these shores. This is an object with lineage.

And yet, the artist does not treat it as relic, but as relic reborn. The result is a piece that is both lighthearted and reverent, a playful ambassador of ecological and ancestral continuity.

Societal Theme:
In The Tipsy Turtle, the past is not buried—it is buoyed. This artwork transforms colonial detritus and consumer refuse into a single form of healing creaturehood. It straddles time: indigenous sustenance, environmental waste, and artistic reuse become one.

It also suggests, softly but surely, that being off balance is natural. That we are all a little tipsy under the weight of history and tides—but still worth saving, still capable of joy, still worthy of awe.

To display this piece in the Free Little Art Gallery is to offer a quiet gift to the collective memory and imagination. A creature assembled from ruin, bearing a smile—and maybe a wobble—toward what’s next.