Marine art deepens our understanding of the oceans – here’s how it has evolved through the centuries

From seascapes and ship portraits to underwater wildlife and coastal scenes, artworks on display this month at the Royal Society of Marine Artists Annual Exhibition 2024 illustrate the diversity of marine art.

Over the centuries, this genre has moved beyond painting and encompasses visual media and even literary forms, such as drawing, etching, sculpture, textiles, photography, poetry and digital art.

Historically, in a western context, marine art played a significant role in documenting naval battles and celebrating maritime history. In the 19th century, artists such as J.M.W. Turner and Winslow Homer became well-known for their depictions of dramatic seascapes and maritime life.

Marine art illustrates people’s deep connections to the ocean beyond Europe and North America too. In the semi-desert Karoo region of South Africa, ancient rock art depicts merfolk.

Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai’s 1831 work Under the Wave of Kanagawa, also famously known as The Great Wave, shows the diminutive Mount Fuji set against the crest of a huge wave. Māori artist George Nuku’s more recent installation Bottled Ocean 2123 is an imagined underwater landscape made from recycled plastic.

So much marine art from around the world shows the entanglements of people and the ocean. The sea was often seen as a space for trade and mercantile travel that involved the violent and cruel trade of people across continents, as portrayed in Turner’s work. But the ocean has also been a space of resistance and freedom. Historian Kevin Dawson describes the ocean as a complex space of leisure, freedom and resistance for communities abducted and oppressed during the trade of enslaved people across the Atlantic, as illustrated also in Guyanese artist Tabita Rezaire’s video installation Deep Down Tidal (2017).

Marine art is a form of storytelling. Visual, performance, sculptural and moving image arts have driven the evolution of marine sciences, too. Illustrating marine botany, drawing wildlife and pressing seaweed are ways to collect, catalogue and share knowledge about the ocean.

However, these scientific processes are historically connected to capitalist and imperial practices, given that most marine scientists were complicit in colonial missions and expeditions to collect marine life. Now, it’s critical to decolonise marine art and sciences.

Changing kelp’s narrative

By engaging with the knowledge and practices of Indigenous people and coastal communities, stories that highlight different experiences of the triple planetary crisis can be told.

Together with ocean governance expert Aphiwe Moshani, marine biologist Nasreen Peer and marine ecologist Loyiso Dunga, we’re studying the different ways that stories about ocean ecosystems can be expressed through art. Our project focuses on the Great African seaforest.

On the False Bay coastline of South Africa, people have depended on kelp forests for recreation, spiritual connections and food for thousands of years. This African seaforest has been known by many communities for centuries – it recently featured in the 2020 documentary My Octopus Teacher and reached huge global audiences. But while this film highlights the beauty and importance of this underwater ecosystem, it’s built on a narrative that overlooks the history of colonialism and the spatial reorganisation of apartheid in South Africa. It does not include diverse voices, as cultural and music studies scholar Gavin Steingo notes.

Other documentary films such as Akshata Mehta’s Kelp: South Africa’s Golden Forests shed light on the environmental and social importance of kelp as a resource, a habitat, and a space of sanctuary for marine life and humans.

The same is true for the work done by Nature, Environment, Wildlife, Filmmaking, an organisation enabling black African scientists to tell their own stories, which showcases the continent from perspectives that resist the colonial gaze. These stories portray the kelp forest as deeply related to livelihoods, culture and spirituality, and as an equal member of the social-ecological system, rather than simply a plant providing benefits such as habitat and oxygen.

Storytelling can help expand our understanding of the multiple, overlapping, entangled values and significance of the kelp forest. It’s one of the most ancient forms of communicating knowledge, values and histories. Recently, it has been recognised by sustainability and biodiversity scientists as necessary to imagine and creatively “foster new ways to address longstanding problems to create better futures for people and the planet”.

Art offers an immersive experience through storytelling — one that can evoke emotion, provoke thought, and inspire action in ways that academic outputs alone sometimes cannot. Using visual art forms such as painting, videography, photography and murals can evoke emotions, embrace complexity and encourage empathy.

In a world where we are continuously taught to think in distinct silos or to work in specific sectors, the idea of intersectional, complex, overlapping, interdependent realities is difficult to grasp. Marine art has the potential to transform this by bringing together different ways of thinking and experiencing the marine world in a visual and engaging way that can challenge assumptions and find fresh ways of portraying life in, on and under the waves.

Giulia Champion, Research Fellow, Humanities, University of Southampton; Akshata Mehta, PhD Candidate, Department of Biodiversity and Conservation Biology, University of the Western Cape, and Mia Strand, Ocean Nexus Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Institute for Coastal and Marine Research, Nelson Mandela University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.