09/02/2026
Please join us for the opening reception for "Michel Droge: Dreams from the Bardo" September 10 at 4:00 p.m. The artist will discuss their work at the opening.
Michel Droge: Dreams from the Bardo, the artist’s solo exhibition in the Danforth Gallery, features works they developed from imagery and experiences aboard a deep sea research vessel where they were an artist-in-residence in 2023.
Embedded with a team of scientists gathering data and imagery from the deep ocean, Droge, observed the remarkable creatures and environments of virtually unknown depths with the Schmidt Ocean Institute ROV Dive Team as they conducted research aboard the Falkor (Too) in June of 2023. The group went beyond the Midnight Zone, an area of ocean so deep it is constantly in darkness, to the Abyssal Plain at approximately 3000 meters. Droge's large-scale charcoal drawings and paintings bring the rarely-seen and vital deep ocean and its moving stories into the space of the Danforth Gallery.
Droge’s recent imagery centers on brooding mother octopuses, solitary creatures who only gather together (if they do) once in their lives, when they nurture nascent octopus young for four years until the eggs hatch, the longest known gestation of any animal on earth, when octopus mothers don’t move or take nourishment. Clustered together in a sort of oceanic “nursery” where heat vents near the ocean floor create the ideal temperature for brooding, the mothers slowly die as they nurture their eggs, making life and death coincident in the continuation of this ancient species. Droge views this transition that the octopus mothers experience in creating life and leaving it within the framework of one of the four bardos described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, an in-between interval between death and rebirth. Droge works from deep sea footage of the extraordinary brooding of octopuses in combination with dreamed and discovered imagery, yielding an interpretation of a stirring natural instance of life, death, birth, and continuity in the profound depths of the ocean.
Image: Detail of Michel Droge, "I Dream Beneath the Rock Ledge with Black Coral" charcoal on paper, 2026
University of Maine at Augusta UMA Student Life
