I spent much of my time at Vashon Residency walking along the low tide beaches along the Puget Sound, picking up rocks with barnacles growing on them. Because I don't see them much in New Orleans, I had become obsessed with barnacles. I began to daydream: What if, like hearing the ocean through a shell, you could see the ocean through a barnacle. They started to turn into portals to me, I put them up to my eyes and they looked like binoculars, and then I ran with it.