Sea inside: ocean interiority in art and visual culture

Sea Inside: Art and Marine Interiority

Pandora Syperek and Sarah Wade

Introduction
The sea as an unknowable and formidable entity is a cliché of the popular marine imaginary. Yet, although the oceans are undeniably vast and complex, the answer to marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson’s famous question: ‘Who has known the ocean?’ is that, in fact, many have!i Implicit in the first lines of Carson’s essay ‘Undersea’ (1937), is that despite their mysteries, oceans contain knowledge and experiences that transcend narrow scientific understandings. Many contemporary artists, rather than succumbing to the overwhelming grandeur or the related trope of the sea as ‘alien’,ii have drawn attention to the varieties of marine experience and how we may relate to these despite our own landbound ‘situated knowledges’.iii Furthermore, this ‘we’ becomes presumptuous when many human groups are deeply familiar with the sea, whether through boating, fishing, diving, the privileged arena of water sports or the horrors of forced or otherwise desperate maritime crossings.

A more immersive view not only challenges confounded visions of the sea by attending to its sociopolitical significance, but also enables myriad aesthetic encounters, which may not be grand or awesome, yet in their varied intimacies offer important underexplored dimensions of these vital saltwater entities and the life that dwells beneath their surfaces. The exhibition Sea Inside, and in connection this essay, explore this alternative aesthetics to the spectacular open sea and the subaquatic sublime that are legacies of the Romantic movement, through artworks that focus on the inner spaces of the oceans, both physical and psychological.

In line with the recent academic fields of the blue humanities and critical ocean studies that have heralded a ‘liquid turn’ in scholarship, thinkers have examined the oceans’ diverse materialities, from viscous to variegated, as models of fluidity and resistance.iv The concept of ‘tidalectics’ posed by Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite (1930–2020) has been especially influential in rethinking art and culture through coastal rhythms,v while the transdisciplinary and transcontinental investigation of the ‘Black Atlantic’ undertaken by Paul Gilroy (b.1956) is but one formative example of scholarship turning to maritime cartographies for inquiries across histories and geographies that deploy the ocean as method.vi With this shift away from terrestrial forms of knowledge, theorists have also reconfigured conceptions of the current ecological epoch to account for its distinctly marine and aquatic dimensions, including in relation to art and curatorial practice. For instance, Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris recently posited the ‘Hydrocene’ as a wet alternative to the geological premise of the Anthropocene; the entanglements of humans, communities, bodies and water in a climate-changing world leads the curator and scholar to recast Carson’s question for the contemporary moment, to ask: ‘Who has known the Ocean in the Hydrocene?’.vii

Here we look beyond the oceans’ immense movements, sweeping expanses and abyssal timescales towards the subtler, more intimate sites and experiences that emerge on the shores and in the depths of a seemingly uncontainable sea. These include feminist and decolonial responses to patriarchal and Eurocentric traditions of the maritime sublime, more-than-human imaginings of the sea as a site of death and regeneration, a turn to marine myth as an alternative to ecological realism, and artistic expressions of the ocean as quotidian, and even mundane. Ultimately, these perspectives onto the oceans lead us to question the very urge to put the sea on display, whether in the home, the museum or the gallery.

Immersive Art Histories
Numerous histories have positioned the sea as an empty and horrifying wilderness in the pre-modern worldview that preceded the era of oceanographic discovery and the coinciding popular interest in seaside leisure pursuits.viii Conversely, the following period of fascination with sea life, culminating in the ‘net-haul after net-haul of strange and fantastic creatures’ of the HMS Challenger expedition of 1872–6, becomes characterised by marine abundance.ix And yet, whether void or bounty, these historical conceptions of the sea are both marked by a sense of psychological fathomlessness. Perhaps, then, it is fitting that the Romantic period bridging these conceptions delivered the height of oceanic awesomeness in the aesthetics of the sublime, which positioned the vast open sea as at once treacherous and intriguing. Nevertheless, this same era was equally marked by increasing popular use of the seaside, including the ‘hydromania’ of wild swimming by the middle and upper classes.x This contrast between the awe-provoking view onto the sea’s surface, exemplified in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich or J. M. W. Turner (as discussed by Courtney Traub earlier in this publication), and the physical experience of marine immersion is notable. Referring to the eighteenth-century philosophers of the sublime, Margaret Cohen and Killian Quigley explain that ‘[s]ublimity has difficulty underwater ... largely because the aesthetic subject, or spectator no longer has the luxury of disinterested and securely distanced contemplation which Edmund Burke and others identified as crucial to its proper functioning’.xi

New cinematic technologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries arguably achieved sublime visions of the submarine zone, from the early films of Jacques-Yves Cousteau to David Attenborough’s television series Blue Planet II (2017); however, artists have pursued a noticeable visual shift from conceptions of the sea as a wondrous ‘Other’ awaiting exploration to foregrounding the existence of a more intimate bodily relationality. The art historical purview of the dawn of the modern environmental movement, for instance, includes artworks aligned with an ecofeminist approach, in which the interrelationships between bodies, ecologies and communities are foregrounded. This approach provided a marine counterpoint to the masculinist tendencies of the dominant interventionist land art, which the art historian and curator Lucy Lippard has called ‘a kind of colonization in itself’.xii The curator Alaina Claire Feldman observes that ‘[m]any artists deconstructing the ocean and environment in the 1960s and ‘70s were women’.xiii For instance, in 1978 Betty Beaumont (b.1946) recycled industrial coal fly ash to create an underwater sustainable fishery and marine habitat designed to benefit humans and nonhumans alike, that was not intended to be seen by human viewers.xiv Beaumont’s work destabilises the ocularcentrism, and thereby anthropocentrism, of much land art and other more recent artworks installed on the ocean floor, the latter of which risk replicating the anthropocentric colonising tropes that have hitherto been tied to marine space, recalling instances such as the US Navy’s Sealab projects (1964–9) and Captain Cousteau’s Conshelf projects of the early 1960s, which attempted to establish underwater habitats to allow divers to live and work inside the deep sea.xv

Critical theorists have recognised the inseparability of bodies and oceans, from Teresia Teaiwa and Epeli Hau‘Ofa’s assertion of Pacific Islander sovereignty summed up in Teaiwa’s statement, ‘We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood’,xvi to hydrofeminist Astrida Neimanis and others’ insistence that our continuity with other bodies of water disrupts the ‘dry, if convenient, myth’ of discrete individualism.xvii Acknowledging this permeability, the Silueta Series (started in 1973) of Ana Mendieta (1948–1985), in which the artist used her own body to variously interact with the earth, features a photograph documenting a sunken imprint of the artist’s body in the sand that is filled with red pigment slowly draining out into the sea in a way that symbolically conflates bodily fluids with seawater and the tides.

Likewise situated on the shore, Bodyshells (1972) by Heidi Bucher (1926–1993), presented in Sea Inside, comprises a film of pearlescent sculptural forms that ensconce the bodies of dancers (in fact, Bucher’s own family members) as they move playfully along Venice Beach to the sound of lapping waves, both protecting and connecting these abstract feminised bodies to the ocean. In contrast with the landscape engineering effected by many earthworks, Bucher’s wearables reference fashion garments and their proximity to the body.

Contemporary artists have continued to explore the relations between bodies and water to transcend notions of their separation, as in Evan Ifekoya’s (b.1988) mindful immersion in the secluded rocky pools of Iceland, portrayed in the video Contoured Thoughts (2019). Here immersion is physical and bodily as much as psychological and spiritual, as an activation of the artist’s dual identity as a shamanic practitioner named Oceanic Sage. In this respect, the artist at once holds tools for soul retrieval and shadow work and is themself held by the medicinal sulphurous springs.xviii As such, the duality of this otherwise unpeopled northern landscape and connections to Ifekoya’s own Yoruba heritage debunks the aesthetic detachment from the land fundamental to the experience of the Romantic sublime. Rejecting the separation of ‘nature’ and humanity, artists and thinkers have recently foregrounded such ‘entanglement’, which, in the wake of the oceanic turn in academia, Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz suggest be reconfigured as saturation, to counter ‘the terrestrial bias of contemporary theory’ through the adoption of a more fluid and liquid model to think (and make) with.xix

From Watery Womb to Undersea Tomb
In line with the patriarchal European tradition of marine otherness, the sea has often been characterised as feminine and maternal, from the nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) equating seawater with mother’s milk to human uteri being envisioned as mini-oceans.xx However, the generativeness of the sea goes far beyond such anthropomorphism. Despite our briny beginnings, Astrida Neimanis maintains that ‘human reprosexual wombs are but one expression of a more general aqueous facilitative capacity’.xxi Correspondingly, artists have explored expanded gestations in relation to the oceans and marine life. In a recent body of work, Laure Prouvost (b.1978) has explored maternal entanglements with the sea, frequently centring on the octopus as a surprisingly relatable mother figure. In most octopus species the female starves herself and dies after brooding her first and only set of eggs.xxii Prouvost’s sculptures see the human-cephalopod separation deteriorate, with octopus arms dripping with pendulous breasts instead of suckers or holding cups and bottles at the ready for nourishment. The artist’s series of ‘Cooling systems’ abstracts these connections and makes plain their broader ecological import, with both mammaries and tentacles acting as standalone symbols of necessary nurture in the face of planetary crisis. Made from Murano glass, these delicate fountain-sculptures become surreally speculative devices, complete with a small watercolour illustrating their use. Cooling system 6 (for global warming) (2018) features eight pink glass breasts emerging out of an ultramarine base in an octopoidal roundabout formation echoing traditional decorative arts, such as the exquisite jellyfish chandeliers by Art Nouveau sculptor Constant Roux (1869–1942); in the accompanying diagram the ruby red nipples spout essential liquid over a desperate human inhabitant of a rapidly heating climate-changing world.

Prouvost’s work amusingly gestures towards the material and ecological inseparability of life that equates human gestation with the oceans: just as the symbiotic relationship of mother and baby defies the modern ideal of the individual, human life relies on the sea and therefore it is crucial that we equally tend to its needs.xxiii In Kasia Molga’s How to Make an Ocean (2019–present), the artist and designer does just that, but on a microcosmic scale, experimenting with growing marine species – namely, North Sea algae – in a series of tiny glass vials. Instead of amniotic fluid, the surrogate medium for seawater in these mini-oceans is the artist’s own tears. Hence, new life emerges out of devastation, in this case tied to the artist’s own grief, both personal and arising out of climate anxiety.xxiv Molga’s project acknowledges the mediation of both the environment and her emotions by technology and the media; in response she designs a ‘moirologist bot’ – an AI version of a professional mourner – programmed to mimic this ancient figure by eliciting emotional responses through algorithmically selected video footage.

The interface between technology and so-called natural gestation is likewise foregrounded in Ghosting (2023) by El Morgan (b.1978), a video that shows footage of baby jellyfish developing under a microscope, set against a soundtrack of the artist’s telephone call with an IVF storage facility. The interaction, in which Morgan’s earnest query into her frozen embryos and ‘how they are doing’ is met by a series of transfers to different departments before getting through to anyone that can help, presents an absurd counterpoint to the life changing possibilities afforded by fertility treatment, linking these ‘miracles of creation’ to a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Such transhuman alignments, whether through technological or nonhuman overlap and collaboration, amount to a type of queering, blurring the boundaries of the human and corresponding gendered roles.

All of these works signal the unquestionably fine line between life and death, and yet in relation to the oceans this threshold is especially fluid. In the watercolour Oceanic Feeling (2024) by Chioma Ebinama (b. 1988), a larger-than-life-sized feminine figure becomes a habitat for various sea life, real and imagined: her submerged body gently modulated by layers of watercolour is surrounded by squids and mermaids, her limbs navigated by tiny skeletons riding fierce-looking fish. Mounted horizontally on a coffin-like concrete plinth, the work suggests an ocean grave, and yet a very lively one, evoking the whale fall, in which the cetacean’s carcass provides vital nutrition for an entire ecosystem of bottom dwellers, and hence figures the sea as a site of multispecies death as well as new life.

Victor Ehikhamenor (b.1970) addresses the horrific history of the transatlantic slave trade via the slave ship hold, a site of unspeakable horrors and a final resting place for many. The installation Do This in Memory of Us (2019–20) features a giant tapestry sewn from over 10,500 plastic rosaries, in hues of cobalt, turquoise, black and white, depicting the plan of the hold overloaded with human cargo. This beautiful object with its distressing imagery appears through its inverse on a mirrored floor spotlit in a darkened room. Stepping onto the flexible mirror, which yields underfoot as if walking on water, the viewer looks down to see themself bearing witness to the scene. A score of Amazing Grace, sung by the Benin City Choir in the local language of Edo further contributes to the immersive experience of the piece, and its complicated mixture of trauma and spirit to emerge out of colonialism’s legacies of violence and resistance.

Mythic Ecologies
It is notable that the shameful history of slavery has fostered a plethora of artworks responding to the related myth of Drexciya. Devised by the eponymous Detroit techno group (1992-2002), this Afrofuturist legend of a Black Atlantis populated by the descendants of enslaved pregnant women who were thrown or jumped overboard in the course of the Middle Passage has provided inspiration for numerous visual artists. Albeit influenced by the worldbuilding potential of this luminous vision arising out of horrendous cruelty, a younger generation of artists is increasingly turning to other mythical beings and their capacity for exploring issues of identity and being in the world in relation to traumatic histories. In Ebinama’s poetic watercolours featuring mermaids and sea nymphs the artist envisions these hybrid figures as relating to queerness and neurodiversity, with the return to the sea equivalent to a sort of ‘unmasking’, a deliverance from the societal pressures to suppress difference or heterogeneity.xxv She writes, ‘the hybridity (half-fish, half-woman) is an interesting (perhaps ancient) means of describing ways of being that do not fit into simple categories’.xxvi This type of re-envisioning of such creatures offers new ways of questioning narratives of normativity of body and mind, and their place in relation to the environment. In her book Disabled Ecologies (2024), Sunaura Taylor examines both the disabling impact of ecological contamination on human and more-than-human life, as a close corollary to environmental racism, and, conversely, the ablism implicit in representing disability as a ‘cautionary tale’ or metaphor, for example for ‘diseased’ ecosystems.xxvii These perspectives are especially relevant in relation to the complex webs of life within the oceans and the ecological damage affecting the sea, testifying to the importance of thinking otherwise for addressing these wicked problems.xxviii

Relatedly, Gabriella Hirst (b.1990) has interrogated the myths of men being swallowed by whales via a series of mixed media work. Cumulatively titled Ambergris (2023–present), the project highlights the exploitation of these cetaceans as a precursor to the petrochemical industry. Reimagining the nineteenth-century whalers’ craft of scrimshaw for the twenty-first century, Hirst delicately carves images of marine species as found in life and as depicted in popular culture into polyurethane sculptures that reference the domestic and industrial products emerging from the bodies of these marine mammals, exploited for human benefit throughout history. Hirst links the desire behind this outward pursuit of capital to the erotics of being inside the body of the whale, explored variously through the artist’s footage of museum visitors walking in and out of the hinged jaws of the preserved body of the ‘Malm’ whale in the Gothenburg Museum of Natural History, Sweden (in which a couple is said to have once been found having sex) and the genre of internet memes showing shirtless muscular men comically emerging from whale blowholes, which have formed part of Hirst’s wide-ranging artistic research into this phenomenon.

Hirst’s project is notable for bringing far-reaching tales, from the Book of Jonah to the Disney animation Pinocchio, into dialogue with environmental and industrial histories and their accompanying cultures. As such, it and related work offer a counterpoint to the focus on documentary realism within the burgeoning field of ecologically orientated art and curation, and thereby meets calls by Neimanis and colleagues to ‘address problems of compartmentalization, alienation, and an unhelpful focus on technocratic management rather than values and ethics’.xxix Correspondingly, the series of sea shanties by the artist Harun Morrison (b. 1981; reproduced in this volume) reworks the traditional form to unite the ballad’s associations of sailorly camaraderie and nostalgic yearning for lives and loves left ashore with consideration for the experience of other forms of sea life, whether biotic, as in the case of whales slaughtered in the Faroese grindadráp, or mythological figures of selkies and mermen. Morrison conceives of these songs as themselves vessels, which carry multiple coinciding motivations, emotions and memories.xxx By containing mythical and environmental issues alongside these themes, these shanties become increasingly capacious, embracing ancient and nonhuman positionalities on a continuum with both traditional and contemporary concerns.

Morrison’s work imbues current concerns for marine biodiversity with the lessons of antiquity. Both selkies – creatures that shapeshift from seal to human – and merfolk – fish-human hybrids – frequently serve as warnings against crossing the terrestrial domain into the aqueous, and hence the tragedies that befall those who pursue them function as potential harbingers of humans’ hubristic exploitation of the oceans.xxxi At the same time, they can be seen as restoring an ecological sensibility to myths, which may have become detached from their original contexts within retellings.xxxii

The Quotidian Ocean
Such folkloric incursions into seafaring life speak to an imaginative dimension that is not limited to the sphere of the sea itself but can also transpire in locations and relations that are closer to home. For instance, the coloured pencil drawings of Shuvinai Ashoona (b.1961) show everyday life in the Canadian Arctic enmeshed with Inuit mythology, such that even a routine dental check-up becomes wondrous, as in the artist’s Composition (At the Dentist) (2022). However, as the writer and artist Tarralik Duffy observes, Ashoona’s ‘drawings cannot simply be described as imaginary worlds intermixed with reality. ... Ancient Inuit beliefs are replete with Unusual beings such as those seen in Shuvinai’s work’, so that we might be ‘left to wonder whether these curious creatures are merely fantastical or perhaps something more rooted in reality than we dare acknowledge’.xxxiii Another example is Ashoona’s Composition (Octopus Sedna Transformation) (2023), which depicts the Inuit goddess of the sea and marine animals as crossing the gender binary as well as divisions between sea and land, legend and daily life. Permeations of the extraordinary into the ordinary and vice versa are therefore a notable theme emerging in wide-ranging contemporary artistic practices.

Ashoona’s work demonstrates how for some Indigenous communities the sea is integral to daily life and culture. In addition to portraying the wondrous in everyday scenarios, other artists locate magical properties within the objects of the sea, brought inside for various purposes. A series of sculptures crafted from abalone shells by Tyler Eash (b.1988) at once speaks to matrilineal descent – these ‘grandmother shells’ are passed on from female elders in West Coast cultures including Eash’s own Maidu heritage – and connects to vernacular culture, such as jewellery – the artist at once carves earrings from the shells and turns them into surrogate body parts and prostheses such as masks. Small enough to hold in one’s hand, these traditional items of trade with their stunning iridescent interiors shapeshift across scales and species; embodying the eyes of ancestors and the stars in the sky, they become a cosmos unto themselves.xxxiv

The awe associated with maritime sublimity may haunt the history of Western art, but recently numerous contemporary artists have sought to tame and domesticate the sea, recontextualising it within the familiar and familial and reimagining it on a human scale in playful and poetic ways.xxxv Such work often uses humour to highlight the absurdity of these endeavours. Characterisations of the oceans as being filled with marvellous lifeforms that are hard to comprehend have been subverted by artists through performance work that seeks to bring sea creatures into closer relation with human realms of experience, foster affinity and even promote wildlife protection. As such, many artists have cast the sea in relation to banality rather than myth and fantasy, whilst challenging the human-centredness intrinsic to ocean exploitation.

In Humpback Whale (2016), Marcus Coates (b.1968) performs whale calls from the confines of the half-filled bathtub of a family home, rubber bath toys and shower gel neatly cropped in shot. This act of imitation can be read as an attempt to bring a marine animal closer to the artist’s daily domestic experiences, or even to better understand what it might be like to be a whale, in turn reducing any sense of perceived distance or difference. Yet the incongruity of imagining a massive, majestic marine mammal through such modest and makeshift means is as charming as it is humorous, suggesting an alternative agenda that at once pokes fun at anthropocentrism and highlights the restricted limits of human understanding. Coates’s work additionally gestures to an alternative method for the creation of knowledge about sea life that emerges through imagination and embodied performance. As scholar Ron Broglio has observed in relation to Coates’s wider oeuvre, ‘In loosing the tethers of what it means to be human, we find new avenues and lines of flight by which to traverse the un-thought of thought’, offering creative possibilities for conceiving and enacting human-marine life relations.xxxvi

Skye Turner’s multimedia forays into the lifecycle of ‘Lady Sockeye’ the salmon explore the pitfalls and possibilities of anthropomorphism. The artist dressed up as a salmon to raise awareness about the anthropogenic disruptions to these creatures’ lifecycles and is shown in a video nervously entering a suburban home in an attempt to find a suitable spot to spawn. The work mobilises a form of ‘animal drag’, most recently described by the artist-academic Nicola McCartney as ‘an activist performance in which a human critically and consciously performs “animality” in order to de-centre humanism, with dress and adornment as key aspects of its dissidence’.xxxvii Turner’s humorous performance in a cumbersome, comic costume thereby has earnest intent, embodying what the ecocritic Timothy Morton has called a ‘playful seriousness’ to show how attempts to decentre humans and better relate to wildlife are necessary, especially in ecologically troubled times, but are nevertheless always somehow flawed.xxxviii

In another effort to challenge the presumed alterity of marine animals, the artist Shimabuku tried to imagine his way inside the minds of octopuses to learn more about their favourite colours and shapes. Putting the results of his cephalopodic experiments on display in a manner recalling a museum vitrine, Sculpture for Octopuses: Exploring for Their Favorite Colors (2010) suggests that octopuses each have their own taste and aesthetic judgment, positing that these nonhumans also possess inner minds. Shimabuku’s work can be understood as a collaboration between artist and octopus, with the resulting installation becoming what the art historian Jessica Ullrich has called ‘interspecies art’.xxxix

Conclusion: The Sea on Display, the Sea Inside
Shimabuku’s sculpture indicates the important role of display in the attempt to bridge human and marine worlds. When it comes to taming and containing the sea, the aquarium presents the domestication of the ocean par excellence. As a Victorian parlour-room curiosity that facilitated viewing the wonder of marine life from the safety and comfort of an armchair at home – or amongst society in the public hall – it put ocean life on display and literally brought the sea inside. The aquarium, conceived by the art historian Marion Endt-Jones as ‘a moving work of art’,xl conflated spectacle and proximity, captivity and wildness, becoming an alluring display model that has been influential to artists and curators since its inception as a locus of critique and contemplation.xli This display method highlights a paradox also shared by museums of oceanography, maritime history, whaling, fishing and natural history in that to exhibit the sea is to bring it indoors to the dry air of the gallery. While these endeavours seek to enhance knowledge and familiarity, such a disjuncture can ironically reinforce distance and separation, affirming allusions of mastery and the prioritisation of the terrestrial. The exhibition Sea Inside seeks to disrupt this tendency.

Artists have troubled the museum as a site of oceanic knowledge, for instance in Brian Jungen’s (b.1970) articulated whale skeletons, which appear like natural history specimens but are in fact made from white plastic garden chairs. This sublimation of cheap commercial products into museum objects elicits questions about value and the formation of knowledge, both in the Western tradition and – with titles like Shapeshifter (2000) – in relation to Indigenous cosmologies. The longstanding photographic inquiry into natural history dioramas by Hiroshi Sugimoto (b.1948), which began in 1976, draws attention to the epistemology of the museum through a focus on the crafted artificiality of these stylised ‘windows on nature’ and their attempts to arrest wildlife in a moment in time.xlii Devonian Period (1992/2004) presents a Palaeozoic seabed scape in which early marine flora and fauna can be seen depicted millions of years before the advent of humans as if captured within the glass of an aquarium, or even alive in their original habitat. Such a vision reminds viewers of the primordial character of oceans, which called forth the origins of life as we know it and from which we humans all evolved, reiterating once again this intrinsic interconnection that humans have with the sea, but also its inevitable mediation.

It is this sense of continuity of humans with oceans and ocean life, as well as the structures of containment and connection that the exhibition Sea Inside explores through multimedia artworks across moving image, sculpture, photography and works on paper, but also with lineages grounded in the decorative arts, craft, fashion and jewellery. The exhibition seeks to highlight our more intimate and imaginative relationships with the sea and marine life that might foster an ethical sensibility in the face of the destruction of ocean species and habitats, to advocate for new ways of thinking about our relations to the oceans on which our and others’ lives depend.

This text is published in Moore, T. and Paranada, J.K. (eds) Can the Seas Survive Us? (London: Culturalis, 2015), pp. 116-131.