This project includes a series of paintings and videos along with a website which attempts to picture various chapters from Herman Melville's novel, Moby Dick.

The website located at isolatoes.isabelmar.com includes chapters which are digital collages mixed from various still and moving images. Clicking on some of these images provides access to passages from the novel (using the Peter Batke on-line archive for Moby Dick). The top menu includes references, sources, quotes etc. and is a play on the opening sections in Melville's novel: Introduction, Etymology, Extracts.

The project started in 2008 after I read the following passage which refers to the islanders (many of them Azorean) working on the Pequod as Isolatoes.

"As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said, that at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say, because in all these cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles. No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage homewards, they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were!" -Herman Melville, Moby Dick