‘You just run with it, you flow with it’: Creating oceans made of resin

In a general store in downtown Sussex, I hold a wooden bowl cradling a frothy ocean. The inside shimmers with tactile blues and whites that press together into a wave and thin into a shore. The water’s movement is glazed and tantalizing. The art is hard and smooth to the touch; I feel I could dip my finger into it and come away with seafoam. 

This is the effect that Dawn McDevitt, founder of RESINate Creations by Dawn, strives to build when she works with resin, a plant-based plastic. 

“The goal is to create some depth,” says McDevitt. “There is some translucence between the layers (of resin) that I do. So, you can see, sometimes, a little bit through the top layer down into the second layer to give that illusion that it’s a deep ocean.” 

Resin is a clear, viscous substance that hardens in about a half hour. It can be mixed with liquid pigments to take on new textures and colours that can be layered into artistic scenes. As resin blends, air bubbles naturally emerge – a feature that can accentuate the art and is guided by use of a heat gun that keeps the resin flowing.

“Heat keeps the resin runny, makes the colours mix, and it’s beautiful,” says McDevitt. 

Sometimes, McDevitt embeds real sand into her creations from New Brunswick’s New River Beach to give her oceans a “sandy feel.” She describes herself as a very visual person, and often seeks photographs of oceans to nurture her style. Her Facebook page is filled with resin oceans that coat bowls, charcuterie boards, wine glasses, and jewelry. Some of her seas shimmer with gentle tides; some are stormy and flanked by sunsets. 

“There’s so much water here in New Brunswick. I’ve always been near the water, and it soothes me.”

The bowl in my hands began as a butternut tree in Red Head, New Brunswick. Once the tree was cut and the wood was drained of moisture, McDevitt’s husband carved it into a bowl, glossed it with a sealant, and passed it onto McDevitt, who heated her studio and turned on the radio.

“I like noise,” says McDevitt of her studio ambience. “I like background noise. It’s mindless.”

She tied her hair, donned gloves and a hoodie, and began mixing white and blue pigments into cups of clear resin. She poured the clear resin onto the bowl first and then began adding colours, the order of the pouring essential to the ocean she envisioned. 

“I’ll do the clear first, then I’ll do the dark blue next, the light blue next, and then the white,” says McDevitt. “Think of the clear resin as a surfboard that allows the white to flow on top of that dark blue and the light blue as opposed to crashing into it. I don’t want the white to completely cover those blues… I want them to be pretty, just like in real ocean where the froth comes in on the ocean and it floats on top.”

McDevitt has around forty minutes of working time before the resin begins to stiffen. Sometimes, McDevitt waits for each layer to harden before she pours new colours, allowing her to contemplate depth and translucency. She considers her process to be a “trial and error,” sharing that each colour glides, sinks, and bubbles differently when blended. Her navy blue pigment, for example, looks as vibrant on a bowl as it does in its jar, while her white pigment is infused with silicone that creates frothy air bubbles when it encounters heat. A system emerges as the quirks of each medium are learned. 

“You just have to play with (the pigments) to get to know them to be able to predict their behaviour,” says McDevitt. “You just run with it, you flow with it.”

She likens her state of flow as that of a gymnast, for whom “the mechanics of their body are so repetitious that they don’t have to think to make movements anymore.” 

Just over a year ago, McDevitt was new to resin. She started RESINate Creations by Dawn in December 2021 alongside her husband. The idea came to her during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I had a moment to think about perhaps reinventing myself,” McDevitt says of the lockdown. She had been a stay-at-home mom who did part time work. “For (my children) to see their mom in her fifties reinvent herself, I think, is pretty darn cool. You’re never too old to try something new.”

Drawn to the vibrancy of resin art she’d seen on Pinterest and Facebook, she began to explore resin during lockdown. She considers resin a “finicky process” that has “a mind of its own,” and consulted books and videos to gauge whether it was a medium she could work with.

Now, she does resin work full-time. Based in Quispamisis, her craft is sustained by partnerships with local businesses in New Brunswick. A furniture maker provides walnut, birch, or maple wood for her husband to craft into items for her, and she procures resin from Saint John’s Tool Library, an organization that supports artists by stocking up on art supplies that might be hard to come by. This replenishes both artists and businesses.

“It helps everything come full circle,” McDevitt says. “Everybody wins.”

McDevitt’s creations have begun popping up in local stores across New Brunswick. She longs to instill inspiration and joy through her pieces, and knows her pieces are “finished” when she feels as mesmerized by them as audiences do. Her greatest guide with her resin art comes when she thinks of her mother, who passed away last year. As she creates, she reminisces on the art her mother loved, an intuition that tells her when a creation is complete. 

“My mom passed away last year, and fortunately she was able to see my work before she passed away,” says McDevitt. “And when I look at something and I say “oh mom, you would love this!”, then I know it’s right. Then I know I’m done.” 

The bowl I hold carries an ocean that I know my mother, too, would love, then an ocean apart from me on another continent. Wrapped in gift paper and placed in a small bag, I am gleeful to keep it for her, mesmerized by the sea and its distance.

Incé Husain is a fourth year UNB psychology student and student journalist who has written for The Aquinian, The Brunswickan, The Atlantic Student Research Journal, and pursues local stories independently at https://theunprecedentedtimes.net/ .