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That Oceanic Feeling

John Hansard, a leading public-sector gallery with an international record of commissioning research-led and critically-engaged art works, invited Lee to develop a new exhibition, http://ronalee.org/that-oceanic-feeling.1/ which secured an Arts Council Grants for the Arts Award.

The work expanded previous research enquiring into systems of seabed mapping, addressing ‘the deep’ as a site of science, imagination and difference. A series of motifs connected to blindness/touch were used to evoke the possibilities offered by sensual modes of perception for new forms of relationality; the unknown/unknowable character of the ocean standing for that which might trouble representational economies of the visible. In line with new thinking around the interconnection of human and ahuman the exhibition probed the limits of geophysical representation, foregrounding, ‘otherness’ to explore new inter-subjective paradigms of knowing and understanding. A symposium, convened by Lee, brought arts, geography, science and philosophy professionals and academics “into productive dialogue” (Christine Battersby – Reader Emerita Philosophy, Warwick) related issues being drawn out in the accompanying catalogue ISBN:085432948X for which Lee also wrote an essay.

That Oceanic Feeling makes an important contribution to multi-modal forms of praxis across the arts/sciences and investigation of art as a form of geographical knowledge, advancing questions about what scientific data is and tells us. It adds to debates around subject/object relations, the technological augmentation of vision and feminist critiques of the capacity of science to address alterity.

Video work from the exhibition (Ama) has been screened an international Art/Geography Conference, Lyon (Feb 2013) and as part of Sea Stories/See Stories, (July 2013) curator Philip Steinberg (author The Social Construction of The Ocean, 2001).

Forthcoming: i) Book Chapter ‘Envisaging the Deep: imagining a relational geography of the uninhabitable’ in Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation. Ashgate 2014 ii) Exhibition The Power of the Sea (Royal West of England Academy, 2014).