Randi Renate’s biography explains that she was born en caul—encased in an amniotic sac. En caul births are sometimes called mermaid births; Renate knows the poetry of her origin story. “I’ve always felt at home in the ocean…free of feeling the weight of the earth, of gravity,” she says. Her high school offered a summer program at the University of Hawaii, where Renate participated in underwater labs and drew corals; in college, she pursued a marine biology degree before switching to studio art.

Today, Renate’s studio is her lab: part of her multidisciplinary practice includes research in the fields of cognitive science and marine biology, and recording CORALESCENCE, a podcast for which she interviews ecologists. Corals are perhaps Renate’s most significant muse; she considers them teachers. “How do corals have proprioception (the sense that lets us perceive the location, movement, and action of parts of the body) in the way that we might? Everything’s so defined by human ontology. It’s interesting to look at these creatures and learn from them.” For the 2022 Socrates Annual Fellowship program, Sink or Swim: Climate Futures, Renate created Are we psychic coral-polyps?, 2022, a cedar, orb-shaped sculpture in which Socrates Sculpture Park visitors could rest and recline, together. The piece draws its shape and purpose from the symbiosis of corals, who thrive collectively, despite the ocean’s continued accumulation of human waste and damage.

It’s this punitive relationship between humanity and the rest of the ecosystem that Renate seeks to invert: What if we understood that we are meant to exist in symbiosis with the planet? In the water, Renate finds glimpses of these possibilities. “There’s this moment when you’re swimming…and you lose the physical edges of your body,” she says. “Living on this earth confines us to our bodies—the way they’re perceived and politicized. In that aqueous space, we transcend or morph into something else.”