There is an animal that has been asked, for as long as humans have watched her, to be more than an animal. She is the largest dolphin in the ocean, though most of the world calls her a whale. She is a predator at the top of the food chain, yet she hunts in families, teaches her young for decades, and grieves her dead.
She is black and white, unmistakable, but what makes her extraordinary is invisible. A brain second in size only to the sperm whale. A language specific to her pod. A culture passed mother to daughter through generations. Her name is Orcinus orca, and she is one of the most wide-ranging mammals on earth, second only to us.
I think about her often when I am in the studio.
I think about her because my work is a self-portrait at the scale of species, and the orca is what a self-portrait at the scale of species actually looks like when you leave it alone long enough to become itself. She carries, quite literally, the legacy of the traits that work. Fifty million years ago her ancestors walked on land, cousins of deer and hippos, and then something in them turned toward the water. The sea selected them. The cold selected them. Their families selected them. And what remained, after all that selecting, was her — a mother who can live ninety years, who teaches her children to beach themselves on purpose to catch a seal, who recognizes the voice of her own pod across miles of dark water.
I carry the legacy of the traits that work.
When I name a piece Eye Sea All I, I am saying three things at once. I am saying eye, the organ that evolved independently in dozens of lineages because sight, again and again, was a trait that worked. I am saying sea, the medium out of which every eye, including mine, first opened. And I am saying all I, the whole of this self pulled back until the frame is wide enough to include everyone who came before me and made this face possible. The orca says the same sentence with her body. Her black and white is not decoration. It is one of the oldest camouflages in the sea, a trait so good at working that entire oceans rewrote themselves around it.
There is another reason I keep returning to her.
The orca is the animal that most clearly shows what happens when a living system is pulled out of its legacy and asked to perform instead. In captivity she develops repetitive, purposeless motions, the body describing a grief it cannot name. She self-harms. Her dorsal fin collapses. Her family is broken and resorted by humans who do not speak her language. A creature made of inheritance cannot survive the severing of her inheritance.
I paint, in part, against that severing.
Every textural layer, every sheet of 24k gold, every mark in the Living Systems series is my attempt to refuse the aquarium. To refuse the flattening of a self into an image that performs but does not belong to anything. A self-portrait at the scale of species is the opposite of a selfie. It is the admission that I am not the origin of my own face. My eyes were opened by water. My hands were shaped by tools my great-grandmothers chose. My nervous system was tuned by predators I will never meet. When I sign Victoria Zeder, I am signing on behalf of a lineage that has been spinning its fable far longer than I have been alive.
The orca's pod has a dialect no other pod uses. Her calls are recognizable to her kin across distances where the water is dark and the surface is far. I think of my paintings this way, as calls across dark water. Someone in my lineage made a mark once, and the mark worked, and it kept being made, and now it arrives in my hand as something that feels like instinct but is actually memory. The orca carries it in her teeth, in her matriline, in the long gestation that produces one calf, rarely, carefully, across a decade. I carry it in pigment and gold and the particular way my wrist turns when a line wants to curve.
Here is the part I want to say plainly, because it is the part that gives the work its urgency. The traits that work are not the loudest traits. They are the ones quiet enough to be passed on. The orca is not the top predator of the ocean because she is cruel. She is the top predator because she is patient, social, attentive, and willing to teach. Her power is almost entirely relational. My power, as an artist, is almost entirely relational too — relational to the women who painted before me, to the galleries who hold the work, to the collectors who carry it into rooms I will never enter, to the viewer who stands in front of Eye Sea All I and feels, for a second, their own species look back at them.
That is the whole project. That is what the Living Systems sub-series is for. A painting is not a trophy. A painting is a pod call. A painting is a trait being handed forward to see if it still works.
The orca has been in the ocean for millions of years, and she is still listening for her mother. I have been painting for only a little while, and I am still listening for mine. The sea is the same sea. The eye is the same eye. All I is the same all I. And the fable we are spinning — sable into fable, dark into story, inheritance into image — is, in the end, the only honest self-portrait any of us can make.
I carry the legacy of the traits that work.
So does she.