Arica Hilton: Deep Diving Into Curiosity By: Rose McInerney Our oceans remain one of the great mysteries of the world. Their deep reservoirs and centuries of artistry and stories have been shaped by seafaring writers, poets, and painters in their continued exploration of truth.
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orks of art illuminate both our human condition and the unexpected discoveries found in these ever-changing waters.
Artists like Ernest Hemingway come to mind with tales of redemption and understanding. The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway’s most celebrated works and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about man’s struggle with nature and his mortality. But what of seafaring women like Arica Hilton who are deep water divers and intrepid explorers? Arica is a luminist who, like Hemingway, sees the world as an adventure in the making. Arica will tell you life is something we create; it doesn’t just happen. When we first met Arica on WomanScape in Artists Who Light Up the Sky, we visited her series of paintings on earthly cosmos and our communion with nature. It stretches the boundaries of our imagination and invites us to reframe our perspective in works like her “American Icon” and the “Universe, Life Unlimited.” Arica and Ernest speak to a growing ethical imperative that focuses on the value of nature and that internal voice in each of us that asks big questions about our relationship to each other and the ways in which we honor the world. In part, this explains why Arica has amassed an enviable list of art collectors that flock to her work. Her series “I Flow Like Water” speaks to these fundamental questions about nature. One of her pieces hung above a Monet painting in the Union League Club of Chicago this past summer as a sister companion to Monet’s light-filled waterlilies.
12 WS Magazine / Issue 01 / July 2019
In another later series, Arica’s “Multiverse” series speaks to the need for repurposing plastics. Arica reframes their use in beautiful ways, using clear paint and plastic canvases that shimmer in the sunlight and dance in the wind. Last spring, they were suspended from the ceiling of the Caux Castle in Switzerland. Every series provides an opportunity to explore new conversations and to voice alarm over egregious plastic pollution and the depletion of our oceans. Last fall, Ocean Geographic came knocking and asked Arica to participate in a world-class deep diving adventure for three weeks in Indonesia. Arica welcomed the opportunity to travel, explore, study and create alongside other renown scientists, artists, photographers, and musicians. For Arica, it meant recertifying her diving credentials and committing to arduous travel that took her from Chicago to Tokyo and Jakarta to Molluccas (Ambon in Maluku). From there, the team boarded the Gaia Love ship in Ambon and explored the area for plastics pollution and aquatic life. Long days were spent sailing among the 75,000 mile stretch of islands and through the Banda Sea and the Seram Sea. It seems fitting that their boat, Gaia Love, is the Greek name for earth personified. Gaia was a Greek goddess and daughter of Chaos; something Arica saw in the plastic pollution among the beautiful lands of Ambon, Maluku and Sorong, West Papua. This Indonesian archipelago of islands is a tourists’ paradise. The experience confirmed what Arica knew: we are destroying our environmental sustainability and choking plankton, aquatic life and the very waters we depend on for our existence.
