Fresh from the success of winning the UK’s highest award at the British Ceramics Biennial Mella Shaw returns to her home city to host the first solo exhibition of Sounding Line. Taking its title from the term used to describe a rope dropped from a boat to the seabed to measure depth at sea, Sounding Line is a large-scale ceramic installation that addresses the devastating effect of marine sonar on whales and other cetaceans. Mella Shaw is an artist and an environmental activist using themes of balance, tipping points, fragility and loss to raise awareness and inspire change. Its exactly five years since a devastating mass beaching of nearly a hundred dead whales across the Hebrides and West Coast of Scoltand and Ireland. The fact that so few people knew about this (herself included) inspired Mella to create this new body of work. In Sounding Line her focus is on the overuse of marine sonar which is having a devastating effect on particularly deep-diving whale species that rely on echolocation. This sonar is used by the military and by companies searching for new gas and oil reserves.
With permission from Nature Scot, Mella has made her own clay using bone-ash from the remains of a Northern bottlenose whale beached on the West Coast of Scotland. Mella has used this to make large-scale sculptural forms inspired by whales’ tiny inner-ear bones. These pieces are then wrapped in marine ropes that resonate with sonar pulse. Visitors are encouraged to touch the ropes that are wrapped around the forms, thereby feeling the vibration travel in their bodies and to reflect on the lived experience of the whales themselves. The installation is accompanied by a short film documenting a return journey taking one of the unfired sculptural forms back into the Sea in South Uist, Outer Hebrides.
Speaking ahead of the exhibition Mella said:
There’s a long history of artists using the imagery of beached whales as a symbol for impending disaster for example in 17th Century Dutch etchings. A whale on land is seen as a reversal of natural order and therefore they are seen as harbingers of doom. Thinking about this current point in climate crisis, a beached whale is a potent image. These majestic creatures have been ejected from their natural habitat due to human activity alone. This work is about the effect of sonar pollution on whales but it is also about the bigger issue of humans’ detrimental impact on every single ecosystem on the planet.
Over the last eight years, I’ve been making work about the climate and ecological crisis that we find ourselves in. Sounding Line is about the mass beaching events of whales that have been happening all across Britain, but particularly in Scotland. One of the main reasons behind it is this increase in the use of sonar to search for enemy submarines and also to search for new oil reserves. I had the idea to make some clay using beached whale bone – much like bone-china is made using cow bone.
I had lots of ideas of different things I could make and it wasn’t until I was actually sketching from the different parts of the whale’s skulls that I found these incredible and tiny inner ear bones. I’ve taken those shapes as a starting point and blown them up massively in size. I want them to be mysterious and ambiguous in their form, so they’ve actually become quite a lot more bodily than the original shapes. This also reflects the amorphous shapes of the whales as they decompose on the shore.
The ceramic forms are wrapped in vivid red marine ropes that vibrate with a pulse based on sonar. People who visit the exhibition will not be able to hear the sonar but instead feel it through their bodies when they touch the rope. That way they have a kind of bodily experience of what it feels like to be a whale disorientated by the sonar. The whole project is a consciousness raising exercise to draw attention to this form of pollution that very few people know about.
At the British Ceramics Biennial Award presentation in October 2023, Alun Graves, Chair of the Award selection panel and the V&A’s Senior Curator, Ceramics and Glass 1900–now, commented:
Mella Shaw’s ‘Sounding Line’ is a truly exceptional and remarkable work, powerful in concept and majestic in execution. It represents in every aspect an extraordinary feat of making, rendering a work that is both poetic and sublimely beautiful, but also confronting and unequivocal in its message. Mella Shaw has realised a work of huge ambition, demonstrating the potency of ceramics and its ability to engage with the issues of our time.
Listing Information:
Mella Shaw: Sounding Line
1 Dec 2023 – 25 February 2024 (11am – 5pm Weds – Sun)
Summerhall (War Memorial and Sciennes Galleries), Edinburgh, Newington, Edinburgh EH9 1PL