Fathoms 2022 - Waiting Their Turn?

 Elora Sculpture Project 2022

 Fathoms 2022  : is a play on that average depth of the oceans against this year’s date (at 3,682 meters, actually 2013 fathoms).

 Waiting Their Chance?  : Who truly knows what creatures may inhabit the depths? How do we evaluate the potential of a life form with an intelligence so unlike our own?

    The reason Earth is a ‘blue planet’ when seen from space is that 70% of the surface is covered in oceans. 

    Unlike the flat dry land that human occupy, the average depth of those oceans is some 3700 metres - a huge volume to contain living organisms. We have only mapped the smallest fraction of even the bottom surfaces. (1) Even this is being done with remote scanning methods, without specialized equipment, humans find it difficult to descend below 60 meters. (2) 

    The truth is that we know less about the ocean depths than we know about the surface of the moon.

    The cephalopods, particularly octopuses, are clearly intelligent. They quickly solve problems, and can pass that information to others. They have excellent vision, adaptable in ways our eyes are not. They have eight arms to our two, with hundreds of manipulator suckers to our ten fingers. They have two limitations, one being that without bones, they are mostly (!) confined to a water environment. Most importantly, they do not live very long, so have such a short time to learn and develop. Evolving past this limitation alone could create startling results.

    Back during the Cold War years, the bet was that Cockroaches would inherit the Earth, after we humans had wiped ourselves off the surface in an orgy of nuclear fire.
The way our world will end is ‘with a whimper, not a bang’, as the Climate Change double barrels of Extreme Weather and Sea Level Rise will literally wash the Earth clean of us. 

Who waits in the wings to rise as the new pinnacle of creation?

Description :
 

    The main body of the sculpture is formed of a number of dished plates, suggestive of a shelled mollusc like an abalone or giant clam. From gaps in the segments, fluted sections of the interior mantle project, brightly coloured on their interior surfaces. 

 

    The shells have a series of punched openings, each containing a long knobbed protective spine to protrude upwards. From the lower edges of the shell emerge a set of eight tentacle like arms, the front pair forked to provide fine manipulation. A pair of eye stocks also mark the head end of the creature. 

Technical :

    The overall size is roughly 60 = 80 cm wide by 100 cm long. The spines lift to a height of about 150 cm, projecting outwards to a diameter of about 150 cm.
    The main body is composed of a series of  3 mm thick steel plates; The shell elements are dished to shape, with holes cut then punched outwards to produce a ‘puckered’ form. These are left the natural ‘from the forge’ surface on the shell pieces (so as to naturally rust with exposure over time). The inner surfaces of the sculpted mantle pieces are spray painted with graduated colours on their intertior surfaces.
The individual spines are mounted to coil springs into the framing inside the body shells, which allows them some subtle movement. The sets on the outside shells are forged from a piece of crimped mild steel pipe.

Prototype spine element, forged from pipe

The longer central set are forged from a single length of round stock, tapered to a long point and ending in a coiled basket like shape. All of these elements are painted with coloured highlights.
The separate arms are forged from angle, using a pinching technique, then curved and spiraled. There is a dark base paint, with bright highlights down the centre of the pinched interior. 

 

'Feather' element, here with dark paint and copper highlights

The eye stalks are forged using various pinching and shouldering techniques on small diameter steel pipe. This ends in a larger flared cone, inset with a solid patterned glass eye (these made by glass artist Shannon Scollard, commissioned for this sculpture).

As with other submissions made in the past to the Elora Sculpture project, this will be a new object, made specifically for inclusion to this presentation.

 

Artist's Statement :

    As a child, before I could do much more than dog paddle and well before I had my first simple face mask and fins, I was entranced by the television adventures of 'Mike Nelson' (played by Lloyd Bridges). I remember making my own twin cylinder, twin hose, 'SCUBA' gear out of cardboard paper towel rolls and 'diving' over the living room furniture. I would have been about 12 when I was gifted that first 'real' mask, proper fins and snorkel. (That last, an early US Divers simple J tube, which I still have, and is my oldest single possession.) I remember staying in the waters around Peterborough Ontario for so long at a session that I could hardly walk back on to dry land after. Through my early teens, I clearly remember the 'Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau' specials - a figure who has long been been one of my personal heroes.

    Simple economics and lack of opportunity limited me to skin diving, and within the confines of fresh water lakes and rivers in Central Ontario. It was not until University in 1974 that I could afford to take an actual (NAUI) training / certification course. Even for that time, this was a 'tough' program, taught by an ex-Navy frogman. The 'warmup' for each segment was swimming a quarter mile worth of lengths of the swimming pool. We had run out of time during that final pool water test, and ended up undertaking buddy breathing, blindfolded - and with no masks. 

     It has become painfully clear to me our current pandemic situation is a core a CLIMATE induced problem. Partially due to my own age (I guess) and most certainly from a life of 'making due' economically, I increasingly feel out of step with the Popular Culture around me. Over the months (going on years) of isolation due to COVID, I have been watching a lot of documentaries, a good number detailing the alarming state of the world's oceans, along with Cousteau, the observations of Sylvia Earle. ( 3 )  

Notes :

1)  " The ocean covers approximately 70% of Earth’s surface. It’s the largest livable space on our planet, and there’s more life there than anywhere else on Earth.
Consider the size of the ocean. Its surface area is about 360 million square kilometers (139 million square miles), and its average depth is 3,682 meters (12,080 feet / 2013 fathoms). Throughout these depths, there is life.
    " By 2020, less than 20% of the global seafloor had been mapped with modern high-resolution technology (multibeam sonar systems), usually mounted to ships, that can reveal the seafloor in greater detail. (The majority of this is limited to the Continental Shelves - areas directly bounded by dry land.) 

    " The deepest place in the ocean measures 11,034 meters (36,201 feet) and is found in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench, at a place called Challenger Deep. "

 https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/facts/ocean-depth.html

2)  ' The normally quoted recreational diving limit for divers with PADI Open Water certification is 18 metres (59 ft) - without greater training and experience.
    (I personally have dove to this depth a few times, although my usual are more in the 10 - 12 metre / 30 - 45 ft range)  

    ' Nitrogen narcosis becomes a hazard below 30 metres (98 ft) and specialized equipment using hypoxic breathing gas is required below 60 metres (200 ft) to lessen the risk of oxygen toxicity. '
    " The open-sea diving depth record was achieved in 1988 by a team of Comex divers who performed pipeline connection exercises at a depth of 534 metres (1,752 ft) in the Mediterranean Sea as part of the Hydra 8 program. These divers needed to breathe special gas mixtures because they were exposed to very high ambient pressure (more than 50 times atmospheric pressure).
    " An atmospheric diving suit allows very deep dives of up to 2,000 feet (610 m). These suits are capable of withstanding the pressure at great depth permitting the diver to remain at normal atmospheric pressure. This eliminates the problems associated with breathing high-pressure gases. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_diving

3) Recommended :

Mission Blue / Silvia Earle : 2014

The Living Sea : 1995

Becoming Cousteau : 2021

Playing with Sharks - the Valerie Taylor Story : 2021

Perpetual Planet - Heroes of the Oceans : 2021

 

Images :

Image One : "This "full disk" image of the eastern Pacific Ocean from the GOES-11 satellite shows Hurricane Eugene (right) off the western Mexican coast on August 2, 2011 at 1500 UTC (11 a.m. EDT)." Credit: NASA/NOAA GOES Project

Image Two : " An octopus named Paul II swims in his tank at Sea Life aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany, in 2010." Credit Roland Weihrauch / AFP/Getty Images

Image Three : Orange Rimmed Flatworm  Seen in ’Spineless - Portraits of Marine Invertebrates’ , pg 48. Susan Middleton, 2014, Abrams, New York

Image Four : Seen in 'Realm of the Giant Pacific Octopus' Credit Jett Britnell

Note that these images were all sourced via the internet, which makes giving correct credit difficult.