“Who has known the ocean?” asked the pioneering American marine biologist, conservationist and writer Rachel Carson in her groundbreaking essay Undersea, published in the Atlantic in 1937. With our “earth-bound senses”, neither you nor I can grasp how profoundly the ocean is a place of paradoxes. It is shallow and deep, light and dark, placid and chaotic, benign and dangerous – filled with surprise and, possibly overall, beauty. For this reason, Carson observed, “no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry”.
The same is perhaps true of visually representing the ocean, from prints to films to multimedia installations. A new book, Ocean, accompanies a sprawling group show at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, a country in which one is never more than 32 miles (about 51 kilometres) from the sea – the fluid, changeable body laps at every just-distant horizon. Anna Atkins, Jean Painlevé, Hiroshi Sugimoto and John Akomfrah are but a few of the artists whose marine visions are presented.
