Meet sea Krob | artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with sea Krob and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi sea, why did you decide to pursue a creative path?
Great question! I have a genetic chronic kidney condition called Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD) where countless cysts grow on my kidneys, which enlarges them. I am the fourth generation in my family to be diagnosed with cystic kidneys. As my kidneys grow, it damages the filtering abilities of the kidneys and PKD is one of the top causes for end stage kidney failure resulting in the need for treatments of dialysis and/or a kidney transplant. Because of my family history with our kidneys, we have a faster progressing mutation with worse life expectancies.

While having cystic kidneys is not ideal, for me, it has framed life in a very unique way. I do things more passionately, I take more risks, and I spend time doing the things I want to do. Some of those things are that I make art, I dig into the history of photography, and I build up community in both the art world as well as the kidney world.

I pursue art making and social practice because it brings joy into my life and is something I will look back on throughout my life with a great sense of pride.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
CONTENT WARNING : miscarriage/abortion and mention of blood

First of all, thank you so much for having me back. I am very grateful to have the opportunity. So much has changed for me personally and artistically since the Rising Star article. I am still in my graduate program at CSULB; I just had my Solo Advancement Show over the ides of March called “Don’t want your damn sorrys” in the Max L. Gatov Gallery. The art made for the show was all made from September 2023 to March 2024, when I went through two miscarriages (one in September and the other in March).

When I first started working on the show, I had gone through my first miscarriage and had a very public abortion. The plan was to be at home with a heating pad and eat leftover birthday cake. But life being unpredictable, my pregnancy tissues passed while I was unfortunately in public at Fig on 7th in DTLA. I was getting my prescriptions from CVS in Target to help start the abortion, when it started on its own. The food court was not open at the time so there were no public bathrooms for me to change my full pad, including the open Gold’s Gym. I was told to leave the premises to find another bathroom with blood running down my legs. In regards to what I thought the show would be about, I wanted the show to highlight my story with the clear need for easily accessible public bathrooms and free pads and tampons in all bathrooms (not just women’s).

At the end of January, I received the joyful news that I was pregnant again with the expectant due date being the same time as my unfortunate miscarriage. It all felt healing and felt full circle. But in February I started bleeding again. It took a while to receive the second miscarriage diagnosis because the pregnancy was still developing just much slower than it should and I wanted to hold onto hope that they would pull through.

It changed how I wanted to think about and make art talking about the miscarriage. There was just so much extra waiting in waiting rooms, unclear answers, running between school/work/the doctors’ offices. I leaned on my relationship to making photos as a way to move through the unknown and into my second miscarriage. Something I learned during that process was that just like how each pregnancy is different, each miscarriage is also different and the second one was nothing like the first.

By the time Super Tuesday had come and gone, so had both of my pregnancies / miscarriages. All that remained was the archive of images I had made for myself. I presented the images as my Advancement Show.
The art went to highlight the sticky inbetweens of being a pregnant/miscarrying non-binary person who is in grad school with a family and how we navigated through rough waters. Something that I found really exciting about this show was all the various photographic mediums that were on display. They act as a different language pointing to all the different aspects of my life.

Just like my miscarriages, my partner and children were all active and present for the entire process. The domestic images of them acted as resting spaces in the hectic swirl that was life.

I am still processing my abortions. I am continuing to think about the whole thing and would like to compile a book once the dust has settled further. It was really healing for me to hear other folks share their experiences around abortion and miscarriage from both the birthing person and the support person.

A couple of resources I found help during that time were the Los Angeles Abortion Support Collective, and Parent Artist Advocacy League.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Honestly, I would take them on the Metro all over the city. Traveling by public transport I feel more connected to the city and the people. I love looking around at the public art that one sees from the train, at the stops, the graffiti, and everywhere in between. The people of the city are what give LA its spirit and traveling by public transit is the best, it feels like being in the darkroom to me. I want to be able to travel from Long Beach to Santa Monica in 30 minutes or less by train and when I am on the 405 that is all I think about is replacing a majority of the lanes for a train system.

As for places to go, the photo section of the Getty is always impressive. The Ice House in Long Beach and Human Resources in LA are great local galleries to go see. When I have friends visit, we mostly food hop. Places we always recommend are Samosa House, Compton Vegan, Grain Cafe in Mid City, and Earle’s on Crenshaw. For drinks, South LA Cafe and any place to get a Crowns and Hops brew. If I have some extra spending money, buying rolls of film from Freestyle Photo.

Yeah, that would be our week. Just wandering the greater Los Angeles area via public transit, looking at art, making photographs, and eating delicious food.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
There are two shout outs I would love to make, one to the LA local organization, Black Image Center in West Adams and the other to the writer Eiren Caffall. The Black Image Center was founded by six young Black photographers who made a community photography space that seeks to equip, uplift, and empower Black people with the skills to share their own narratives. They are building and nurturing artists. They deserve nothing but love and respect as well as all the funding so that they can continue their legacy in Los Angeles.

I also want to shout out Eiren Caffall. She is an author that writes beautifully about having PKD and connecting it to life. All the articles on her website were really healing for me to read during my recent health event. I am still trying to figure out how to think and talk about having cystic kidneys myself in a way that doesn’t frame myself as broken, damaged, bad, or wrong and reading Eiren’s writing challenges how I think about my body. I really appreciate her writings and am looking forward to reading her book.

Website: seakrob.com

Instagram: @sea.krob

Image Credits
Photo Credit (artist portrait): El Nicklin et al images: sea Krob