Stay Afloat: Art Exhibition Explores The Rising Sea Levels
From a high chair to the ocean floor, Can the Seas Survive Us? at Norfolk's Sainsbury Centre delves into our aquatic world and the climate crisis.
One of the most eye-catching pieces at an exhibition in Norfolk this weekend is an oak chair. It may seem ordinary at first, but it is suspended high in the air. Why? Because this is where it will need to be by 2100, due to rising sea levels in the Netherlands, where it was created by artist Boris Maas. Titled The Urge to Sit Dry (2018), a similar chair is displayed in the office of the Dutch environment minister in The Hague, serving as a constant reminder of the looming and urgent threat posed to the country by rising sea levels. The chair is part of Can the Seas Survive Us?, an exhibition opening this weekend at the Sainsbury Centre, a Norwich-based art gallery and museum. The location holds special significance, as Norfolk is one of the UK's most vulnerable areas to rising sea levels. The exhibit invites visitors to take a metaphorical plunge into the complex, often murky realities of an ecosystem we all know is at risk, yet struggle to understand, let alone know how to address. “As with many of the difficult, pressing issues surrounding climate change and the planet’s future, people often don’t know where to begin,” says Jago Cooper, director of the Sainsbury Centre.
“We have the ability to project people’s imaginations and realities to places and spaces they would never normally encounter from melting Arctic ice floes to the Pacific centuries ago, to beneath the sea today.” The exhibition is made up of three distinct shows. The first, A World of Water, takes place in a series of underground galleries painted in two colors: a soft baby blue above, symbolizing the sea we swim in, and a deep marine green below, representing the vast, hidden depths of the ocean. One of the featured objects is a tall, grey-green sculpture with a Barbara Hepworth-like aperture at its center. However, this piece has no connection to Hepworth—it was created by Rotterdam artist Jan Eric Visser, a sculptor who uses discarded materials, in this case, plastics collected from waterways. Many of the artists in this exhibition curated by John Kenneth Paranada, the Sainsbury Centre's curator of art and climate change are Dutch, highlighting the profound impact the climate crisis has had, and will continue to have, on the work of those who feel the threat most deeply.
In one remarkable textile piece, Radical Furniture for Radical Times (2019) by Koen Taselaar, octopuses known for their intelligence and adaptability appear to have taken over an underwater home, complete with brightly painted staircases, dressing tables, lamps, and a sofa on which a couple of octopuses are comfortably lounging. British artists are also addressing the climate emergency: both Maggi Hambling and Claire Cansick, whose works are featured in the exhibition, have openly expressed their concerns about climate change and its impact on their art.
Hambling’s Wall of Water VIII (2011) is a standout piece in the show—a surge of greys, blues, pinks, and blacks that is both hauntingly beautiful and foreboding. Cansick’s canvases, painted from snapshots she took while swimming, blend the realms of sea, land, and sky—her depictions of waves may also resemble grass or clouds.