Flooded Dinner

2023
graphite on paper
80 x 155 cm
Holmes à Court Collection

Flooded Dinner is a continuation of my recent drawing practice, which has used graphite chiaroscuro technique to generate imagined scenes on the deep-sea floor. In Flooded Dinner a lavish meal takes place in the unlit depths of the ocean, or perhaps on land where the sea-level has risen. There is no eating and instead dinnerware and plastic takeaway containers are habitats for cephalopods and a substrate for sponges. The initial impetus for this drawing was to consider my conflicted relationship with seafood, based on my notions of animal intelligence. I often interact with octopuses when I’m freediving and I recognise their curiosity and almost preternatural intelligence, so as a result I no longer eat them. Recent studies have begun to also understand intelligence within fish species, including complex social structures, intergenerational learning and even the ability to dream. Yet there is something about cephalopod behaviour that for many of us places octopus within the uncanny valley and off the plate.

Mammalian Dive Reflex

2023
graphite on paper
106 x 78 cm
private collection

Mammalian Dive Response features a human ribcage and spleen inhabited by two species of echinoderms: mosaic sea stars and a sea brittle. The work explores deepsea breath adaptation. 

Ocean Inside Us

2023
graphite on paper
43 x 34 cm
private collection

All life began in primordial seas. I wonder then; is there a tiny residue of memory, deep inside the cells in our bodies, that remembers these origins? Much of my work speculates on our past and future interactions with the ocean. The Ocean Inside Us explores our relationship with submerged ecologies, suggesting that our connection to these spaces is now largely mediated through screen technologies rather than direct encounters. When I made this drawing, I was also considering the anxiety that young people feel when exposed to news about rising sea levels. Will they be inheriting a flooded world, and how will humans avert or adapt to this future?

As an artist working across drawing, film and sculpture, this work was created as a study for a series of prosthetics and a short film work that I plan to make. It is rendered in graphite using a chiaroscuro technique – making forms from light and dark. While somber in tone, The Ocean Inside Us also celebrates the fecundity of nature and the resilience of humans to adapt to change.