Private Story
Twenty Thousand Bones
Delicately yet firmly pinching the tiny vertebrae of a Chinook salmon between her thumb and pointer finger, Cynthia Gibson pushed fearlessly toward a rusty grinder churning an aggressive 3,400 rpm. The spur where a rib was once connected flew off into a cluttered garage leaving a smooth bead behind.With patience and confidence, Gibson slowly built a dress from twenty thousand salmon bones.
“I’ve always been fascinated with the natural world,” said Gibson. On her belly as a child, she would examine the delicate joints on blades of grass — dismantling them, weaving them, inspecting them. In nature, she discovered her passion for art and sought inspiration there. “There’s so much outside that is used in regular art today, and we don’t always recognize that.”When she settled in Sitka, salmon became her muse. Walking down the beach one day, eyes focused on the pebbles, shells and other ocean treasures in her path, Gibson became entranced by a pile of salmon vertebrate.The idea was born.
“Salmon connect us all. They are in our waters, on the beach, in our forests, in our freezers. Salmon are a part of who we are,” says Gibson.Intrigued and inspired, Gibson decided to combine her passion for natural elements with her interest in wearable arts and fashion. She began collecting, dreaming and eventually, imagining a dress adorned with Alaska’s wild beads.“When you see them on the beach you’ll see small piles of maybe twenty vertebrae but I knew I would need thousands, I wanted to challenge myself. One fall, there was a particularly heavy concentration of salmon carcasses downtown and I would go down each weekend and collect buckets of them,” she said.
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