Too big to fail
I've been obsessed with the ocean lately. While I've always loved the beach, and for years wanted to be a marine biologist, over the last few months I've started trying to make photographs about the ocean, trying to find ways to capture what it is and what it means. I've been thinking a lot about how the ocean is a place for leisure, but also of terror (I've nearly drowned 2-3 times, have had some pretty close encounters with deadly octopus, etc), it's a global highway, a military zone, a biological wonderland, a carbon sink and the most alien place on Earth (while also being the definition of what makes this planet habitable). The ocean is connected to the moon, the sun, rivers, land, and time. It moves in cycles that are beyond any sense of human time to experience, yet we can measure it. Water is soft, hard, cold, warm, refreshing and morphs all of our senses. The ocean is too large for us to even hold in our heads - it's beyond our mind's capacity to know. Yet, like everywhere, it is also substantially impacted by human activity.
To me, this expanse is what makes the ocean so interesting and so ripe for art work. How could I explain all the shit that's happening in and around the ocean? The web of things like pollution, invasive species, conservation, fishing, play, texture of water, the fear of drowning, the fear of sharks, etc. If I was to write something about this it would end up just a list of things I think about, it would be messy and probably quite useless. But art, on the other hand, has this fantastic relationship with scale, art can take something too large for us to think of and package it in a way where we see the connections and appreciate the size. Rather than seeking to know, art can help us see. Sometimes art can show us things we can't say, which is kind of amazing, isn't it?
It's been quite annoying talking to folks about the ocean and making art. They'll politely ask 'what do you want to do with the ocean?' or 'what kind of art are you working on about the ocean?' and it's like 'fucking everything dude!'. I want to be in a lab that's growing coral, I want to be in the waves photographing the droplets that fly off the top of the spray, I want to swim with whales, see plastic pollution, find fishermen, see a navy base. Just try to grab it like water flowing through your hands or trying to catch a mosquito out of the air - really hard but not impossible. I like the idea of leaving different types of images with a lot of difference between them and asking people to work it out. Maybe that's the fun - NOT having it worked out. What can I say about the ocean? We did a good job with whales, but not with sharks? We have polluted it but it could also save us? People care about it but some don't? We love to swim but it can becoming suffocating in an instant?
It's funny, initially I wanted just to focus on whales. A real success story of conservation, but now people are demanding (and being granted) access to swim with them, a practice that isn't evil at all, but I think says something about how we relate to the world. Whales have largely bounced back because there's nothing they do that competes with us, and they live in the least accessible parts of the Earth, yet there's opportunities to dive and get up close (relatively) for tourists, for folks like me. But as soon as I started thinking about that (conservation, distance, closeness, tourism) I started thinking about all the other stuff: the boats, the reefs, the empty vastness underneath you when you're in the deep ocean, the fear, the fun. Art can contain all of these things.
Just to sort of end this ramble I wanted to write a bit about sharks. So many of us in Australia have a panic about sharks, but the reality is they are just not a threat to humans. While this might be insensitive given that there was a fatal shark attack in Sydney this week I want to point out that that was the first fatal shark attack there in 60 years. How many other things have not killed someone in so long? More people die from almost anything that one every 60 years. Most of the other shark attacks in Australia happen in specific places at specific times where large numbers of people venture out to places where seasonally sharks gather. Yet, despite this, relatively few people are harmed, a minuscule number. Yet, culls, shark nets, baited traps and a constant, pervasive fear just stifle almost everyone and enables some of our most horrific behaviour. Again I find myself encouraging us to make space for nature that makes us uncomfortable, but it is important.