I've always been fascinated by the sea.

I feel like the sea is full of secrets.

When a coral reef is really healthy, it's like a bustling city.

Times Square reminds me of a coral reef.

Because there are so many different people.

There's lights going off.

There's horns honking.

A coral reef has all those different players.

There's giant sharks, and tiny little snapping shrimp, and little corals that are quietly sculpting these giant skyscrapers.

I think of a degraded coral reef as a city that's gone bankrupt.

It has a ghost town feel.

I'm Courtney Mattison.

I'm a ceramic sculptor and an ocean advocate based in San Francisco.

We're in my studio.

I am surrounded by jars of tentacles that I have made out of porcelain that are ready for my next project.

And I have some work in progress.

A lot of times I want to create monuments to coral reefs.

I want to celebrate them in as big a way as possible, to get people's attention and get them to care about protecting them.

I really hope that I'm not creating memorials to coral reefs.

A lot of times I feel like I might be, but I hope that's not true.

I loved exploring tide pools as a kid.

My mom would take me to the piers of San Francisco, and I was always just really fascinated with what was living in my own backyard.

Once I started scuba diving, I really decided I needed to keep studying marine biology.

I was fascinated with the science of marine ecology, but also the science of conservation biology.

And so as I was falling in love with coral reefs, I was also becoming heartbroken to learn how threatened they are by human activities and especially climate change.

In 2007, when I was in college, I studied for a semester at James Cook University up in Townsville, Australia, and I was doing fieldwork on the Great Barrier Reef, studying coral reef and reef fish ecology and doing a little bit of sculpting on the side.

But my main focus was really to dive in literally and learn everything I could about the Great Barrier Reef.

And then I talked about it for the next nine years, and right after I got back from Australia and finished my senior year in college, my boyfriend, we met and like the first thing I told him was how cool the Great Barrier Reef was.

And as we were dating and then eventually got married and I nine years later, I wanted to take him to Australia to see the reefs that I had fallen in love with.

It just happened to be the same time as one of the biggest coral bleaching events in the history of the Great Barrier Reef.

Warming sea temperatures, in particular, often cause coral bleaching.

It happens really quickly, so that's something that I had never seen before.

And I don't want to say I was lucky to see it, but in a way, it was fortunate that I actually saw such extensive coral bleaching.

I remember kind of looking over and all of a sudden, just the staghorn corals, for as far as I could see, were ghostly white, just completely white.

And so that way of emotionally like kind of getting hit over the head with how much these reefs were in trouble, really motivated me to refocus and start communicating it more than ever.

I realized that I could impact people's emotions by creating artwork that celebrated the beauty and fragility of coral reefs.

A lot of the work I do has a sense of emotion that transfers between individual pieces in the installation, so a lot of times I'll start from the center and work my way out.

Once I come up with a design, I create a gigantic template that's full scale on the floor of my studio.

So to do that, I use Photoshop, and I put my hand-drawn sketch into kind of a digitized format and figure out exactly the measurements of every single piece.

A lot of times my installations can have hundreds or even thousands of pieces in them.

I use a couple of different clay bodies to create my work.

There's a stoneware clay that I use, and then I also use some elements that I create out of porcelain and then stick into my work as I'm building.

The fragility of a coral reef in the wild, I find really similar to the fragility of porcelain anemone tentacles or stoneware coral branches.

That sense of fragility is really fundamental to the message of my work.

I think it's an interesting concept that people really want to touch the textures in my work, especially some of the most fragile ones, but if they do, they risk breaking it.

And that's the same as if you're exploring a coral reef, because if you touch a coral, you can kill it instantly.

The actual building process for me, I'm pretty quick.

I do all the building for the most part myself, and I don't use any molds, so I freeform build everything by hand.

So every single piece is one of a kind.

I use all kinds of different tools to texture my work.

I think one of the most beautiful things about a coral reef is the diversity of different forms and textures that are involved in kind of creating this coalescing of different species.

So I'm constantly inventing new tools to make different textures.

For example, I have like dental tools and some of the dissection tools that I used as a marine biology student.

I spend hours just sitting here poking thousands of holes with chopsticks and paint brushes and toothpicks and whatever I can get my hands on.

A lot of my work shows the transition from really healthy, colorful, vibrant coral reefs, transitioning into coral bleaching, and showing that contrast.

Corals can actually recover from bleaching.

They usually die from it, but there is that possibility.

And so that's something that I explore in my work as well.

I think coral bleaching is a really stark way to visualize climate change.

Coral reefs are beautiful when they're healthy and colorful and vibrant.

But there's something also hauntingly beautiful about a bleached coral reef that we find interesting to look at.

I think art is really powerful in communicating environmental issues.

Art can shape how we view the world and our relationship to it.

I really hope that people seeing my work feel the way I do, when I'm hovering over a coral reef in the wild.

I hope that my work sparks a sense of curiosity in viewers, and makes them want to learn about how coral reefs are important to them.

And maybe that's sparked by them wondering why I would make such gigantic installations, and why coral reefs are so important to me to begin with.

So few people get the chance to really put their faces underwater and explore down at eye level with these marine creatures, and I think it's a really amazing way to feel like you're part of this incredible planet that is ocean based.

Like over 70% of the world is ocean.

And as humans, we know so little of it.