Child/ren of the Bloom — LaJuné McMillian

Child/ren of the Bloom by LaJuné McMillian is an interactive, multidisciplinary installation that explores the threshold between land and sea, and the body's return to its origins. Developed alongside the artist’s 2026 OceanX Education's artist residency, piloted in partnership with Pioneer Works, the exhibition transforms her research on phytoplankton, algal blooms, and bioluminescence into a spiritual, embodied encounter with oceanic systems. Through animation, sculpture, sound, interactive systems, and prayer, McMillian considers how bodies are transformed within oceanic systems.

Within McMillian’s ongoing Mother of the Sun project, portals are not fixed, but rather spaces where one state of being gives way to another. Child/ren of the Bloom follows Child, a recurring avatar in the artist’s work, through a first threshold crossing, where water is a metaphor for an early encounter with the spirit world. As Child dissolves into oceanic life, McMillian draws a thread between their own childhood experiences, vulnerability, and the foundational role of phytoplankton within marine ecosystems. Moving between scales, from microorganism to ocean and from atmosphere to cosmos, the installation reveals a world in constant transformation.

An interactive floor-to-ceiling video installation illustrates the body's movement in the ocean using different scales, from satellite imagery of algal blooms—dense overgrowths of microscopic algae—to 3D visualizations of individual phytoplankton. A sensor tracks visitors’ hand movements and changes the image in response. As two hands move closer to each other, the image contracts to reveal detailed views of individual phytoplankton drifting through luminous underwater environments. As hands spread apart, it expands from human-scale underwater environments to satellite views of algal blooms stretching across entire coastlines. These shifts in scale continue throughout the gallery. Bioluminescent dinoflagellates—single-celled marine plankton—appear in intimate holographic displays, while satellite imagery inspires the beaded embroidery framing a hanging scrim sculpture, the vastness of outer space translated into tactile, hand-stitched detail.

The exhibition simultaneously grapples with the history of scientific racism by engaging with the visual legacy of 19th-century German artist and biologist Ernst Haeckel, whose intricate illustrations of marine life helped shape the modern ecological imagination. Haeckel, who coined the term ecology, was also a proponent of eugenics, and by engaging with his work, McMillian considers how beauty, classification, and scientific racism have been entangled with systems of knowledge. Translating Haeckel’s iconic drawings of phytoplankton into three-dimensional models, McMillian places historical systems of classification in dialogue with contemporary scientific imaging and speculative digital forms to consider how inherited ways of seeing might be broken open and reimagined.

Visitors will also encounter a sonic landscape comprising voiceovers and prayers written by McMillian, which are woven into a score produced by multidisciplinary artists LAMB and Rena Anakwe. For McMillian, prayer functions as a material and a structure within the work: a way of holding grief, transformation, ancestral memory, and the possibility of renewal. During her residency at EY Intelligent Realities Lab, the artist has also developed a virtual oracle that invites visitors into conversation with Child via an interactive chatbox, offering a space to reflect on transformation as well as humanity's relationship to the ocean.

Child/ren of the Bloom is the culmination of a collaboration between Pioneer Works and OceanX Education, a nonprofit working to unlock the ocean’s sustainable potential. As part of a yearlong program, McMillian boarded the OceanXplorer, an advanced deep-sea research and media vessel, for artistic and scientific research.