For this year's theme around 'Ocean', Cecilia Charlton has created 4 new handwoven artworks, each artwork making reference to a different zone as one travels from the surface of the ocean to its greatest depths; the works represent a journey through the Sunlight Zone, Twilight Zone, Midnight Zone, and the Abyssal Zone. Utilizing a weaving pattern of her own design rendered in the overshot technique, she manipulates colors and forms to evoke the feeling of these underwater spaces. There is an analogy that can be made between the ocean and the mind, with activity visible on the surface and undiscovered depths lurking far below. Transcendental meditation hypothesizes there’s a vertical dimension of the mind that’s far deeper than intuition or the subconscious, a place where the mind is already perfectly settled and unbounded -- similar to the stillness and the mystery found in the ocean's deepest parts.

The titles originate from an idea around processes of learning called the 'conscious competence' learning model. In the first stage of this model, the subject is unaware of what they don't know and therefore it can be related to the Jungian idea of the conscious mind. As the subject becomes aware of their gaps in knowledge or skill, they can then move through stage 2 and into stage 3, where they have learned and are aware of what they know. The final stage of learning occurs when the subject is so familiar with the material that the knowledge recedes into their subconscious, where it can be accessed through intuition rather than through the conscious mind. Understanding and augmenting the subconscious is at the heart of these works.

Ultimately, these artworks use the repetitive nature of craft as well as the aesthetics of geometric pattern to explore the relationship between craft processes and the subconscious mind, through the metaphor of the ocean.