82. Sea Creatures in Art History
Art history swims with sea creatures, as subject or ornament, real or fantastical: in Roman baths and medieval bestiaries; in cabinets of curiosity, from pufferfish to mermaids to Frederik Ruysch’s anatomical “corals” fashioned from human vasculature; in the enigmatic Margate Shell Grotto; and in Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone, Damien Hirst’s Forms without Life, and Aki Inomata’s hermit crab cities. Why have sea creatures been so prominent in art? What is distinct about materializing and visualizing them, rather than writing about them from literary or scientific perspectives?
This panel, consisting of four 15-minute papers followed by a roundtable discussion, complements the AAH’s recent “Blue Aesthetics” sessions by placing specific images of marine life at the centre of analysis. It extends the ongoing work of, most notably, Syperek and Wade’s long-term research project “Curating the Sea,” the colloquy “Towards a Blue Art History,” and the broader field of the blue humanities.
Contributors will each examine a single work representing marine life—actual or imagined, from any period or region—asking: What creatures are depicted, and why? What knowledge did the artist or patron draw upon, or seek to produce? Or does the representation of sea creatures instead resist systems of knowledge, as with the “oceanic sublime,” or when shells figure as vestiges of absent life? And how does the work figure the sea-creature condition in relation to the human condition, considered in dialogue with thinking beyond art history—such as Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds, Susanne Wedlich’s Slime, Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, and David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster”?
Themes: marine life, blue humanities, art and philosophy
Additional format comment:15-minute papers followed by a roundtable.
Lead Convenor: Amy Gillette, Woodmere Art Museum, USA
To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.