Description |
This book accompanies a major exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary and Tate St Ives in 2013, which it illustrates in full.
Including new essays by Philip Hoare, Simon Grant, Kodwo Eshun and Alex Farquharson, it also presents an anthology of sub-aquatic texts by Stacy Alaimo, Maya Deren, Celeste Olalquiga, James Hamilton-Paterson, Marcus Rediker, David Toop, Marina Warner and Wendy Williams, as well as literacy works by Hugo, Lovecraft, Shakespeare, China Mieville, Adrienne Rich, Jules Verne, Derek Walcott and Vernon Watkins.
Ninety percent of the earth’s oceans remain unexplored. Science knows outer space better than the ocean deep. Scores of new species, weirder than any fiction, are found each time a submersible descends to the ocean’s deepest trenches.
In the absence of knowledge the deep is a site where imagination has full rein. The ocean has always bred monsters, and like outer space has been a setting for science fiction since Jules Verne. But unlike outer space, the oceans are part of our own planet – and by extension a part of us too.
Throughout recorded history the deep has been the site of shared myths, subconscious fears and unnamed desires. Aquatopia, then, is less about the ocean as it actually is – it is about how it lives in our heads.
This major exhibition brings together over 150 contemporary and historic artworks that explore how the deep has been imagined through time and across cultures. Sea monsters, sirens, sperm whales, giant squids, octopi, submarines, drowned sailors and shipwrecks are all portrayed here by many of art history’s “greats” JMW Turner, Odilon Redon, Hokusai, Barbara Hepworth and Oskar Kokoshka among them. Steve Claydon, Wangechi Mutu, Juergen Teller, Alex Bag, Christian Holstad and Mikhail Karikis are some of the many celebrated contemporary artists amongst whose oceanic – inspired artworks are shown here too. |