Ocean Calling
A portal for speaking to lost loved ones through the wind and the waves
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How often do we wish we could pick up the phone for just one more call?
Coming April 12 to the new park at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, CA, the Ocean Calling booth invites you to speak your words of love, grief and remembrance into the wind. While the phone isn’t connected to a landline, the wind and the waves carry your words onward as you join an interconnected web of people who have made and received calls. The first threads were spun between Outer Sunset artists Jamae Tasker and Sarah McCarthy Grimm, who were both grieving younger siblings. Jamae’s younger brother died in June 2023 and Sarah’s younger sister disappeared in September 2023.
Through this collaboration, they hope to offer a tangible way to reach out to lost loved ones. The intention is to make grief visible and communal, to replace shame and isolation with the possibility of catharsis and maybe even connection to others. Mirroring the phone calls to lost beings, the window honors the now-extinct Xerces blue butterfly as a symbol of the grief we communally hold for ecological loss. In response to that loss, the planter boxes will be full of San Francisco native plants, welcoming other pollinators to support our coastline’s diversity.
Ocean Calling is dedicated with love to RM & CG.
About the Artists
Jamae Tasker (@mamaladysmix) has lived in San Francisco since 1996. She is an Outer Sunset resident, a mother of three and a mixed media collage artist. Since 2014, she has been the Director of Sunset Cooperative Nursery School, right across the street from our beloved Ocean Beach. In this role, she supports children and families using connection, play, parent education and anti-bias practices. This includes supporting them through times of grief. Jamae also uses her mixed media collage practice to process the joys and pains of being human, including individual and collective grief. At times, her connection to Ocean Beach, her role as an educator, and her art world collide into beautiful, community-centered, healing projects. Jamae has felt drawn to artwork about grief after losing her youngest brother to suicide in June of 2023. That’s how she discovered the Phone of the Wind, and decided to start planning the Ocean Beach Wind Phone. What she wouldn’t give for one more call. She then invited Sarah, a fellow Outer Sunset artist who had also lost a sibling but in a different way, to collaborate on this project.
Sarah McCarthy Grimm (@sarahgrimmstudio) is an interdisciplinary artist who has lived in San Francisco since 2014 and the Outer Sunset since 2017. Her core intention is to reinforce the interconnection within humanity and between humankind, the ocean and the cosmos. Her practice weaves together painting, printmaking, film photography, writing, and participatory projects. She was honored to be invited into this project by Jamae Tasker, as they share a painful point of connection in losing younger siblings. The loss that Sarah is experiencing is an ambiguous one - her sister Chelsea, 1.5 years younger and her only sibling, disappeared from a rural road in the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona on September 30, 2023. Her car was found locked with most of her possessions neatly stored within it, and there has been no confirmed sighting of her since. This particular shape of grief infuses her artwork, particularly the Loss Spectrum project, which includes a monthly creative coping circle at local community space Sealevel, monotypes, large scale collages and now Ocean Calling.
Acknowledgements:
Many thanks to lead builder Raylan Willis, whose expertise and dedication made this project possible. This piece is inspired by Itaru Sasaki's Telephone of the Wind (2010), and placed at Ocean Beach through the support of local nonprofit Friends of Ocean Beach Park.