Soundings: An Interview with Emma Critchley

The Channel’s Fi Muncaster and Pluto Williams speak with Critchley about her installation. 

“We really, really need to look after it and protect it and think about the Ocean and its inhabitants  as our kin or our cousin, rather than thinking about it as this remote space.”

Source: Emma Critchley.

Emma Critchley’s Soundings will be at Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts between Friday 16th to Friday 23rd of May. It is a three-screen installation which shows footage from the deep sea. It will also feature live dance performances on Friday 16th and Saturday 17th of May.

We wondered if you would like to start by explaining this new piece to people who may not be familiar with your work? 

It’s exploring our relationship with the deep Ocean in light of deep sea mining, which is a completely new extractive industry that may start this year. The first exploitation could begin now  in the very imminent future, and the piece is thinking about how it kind of feels like we need to have  some kind of connection with this place. How can we find or build a relationship with a place that  most of us will never go to. It feels like we need to find some way of connecting with this space in  order to care and to protect the Ocean. Thinking about the ways that we think about and talk about places like the deep Ocean are fundamental to the ways in which they end up being governed. It’s exploring different ways we might find a connection that is kind of more bodily so it uses dance and  drawing and song is also involved. So thinking about other ways we might find a connection or  ways that we might find a connection through the body that are at times less cerebral. Thinking  about different ways of relating to each other that are perhaps more sensitive to nature.  

We saw that this isn’t your first project about deep sea mining, so what first brought your  attention to it and made you realise that you want to explore this concept? 

I’ve been working with deep sea mining as a subject since 2016, actually. Not solely but I’ve been  very engaged with the subject since then and what fascinates me about it is the deep Ocean is such a  vast percentage of the planet, it’s so huge. Most of the water is international water. It goes beyond individual territory. Every country has 200 nautical miles of national jurisdiction, and then the high  seas, which is what deep sea mining is about, is the rest of that. All of that falls under the heritage of humankind principle so it’s a vast area of the world that is beyond national jurisdiction. Deep sea mining falls into this area, and the impacts are potentially huge. We don’t know, we don’t know  because it hasn’t started, but there are potential environmental implications in terms of the plumes  that are created in mining that could affect tourism and fishing, and lots of these align with coastal  communities. It also has cultural implications, particularly with Pacific nations that have very deep  ancestral relationships with the deep Ocean. But it’s also economic, it’s geopolitical. You know, it’s  mining, so all of the known colonial baggage of mining and the history of that. That’s still playing  out in terms of who is able to mine and who is claiming territory in the high seas. So for me, it’s just fascinating on so many different levels. 

Have you worked with dancers before?  

I have worked with dancers a bit. So this is the third project where I’ve worked with dancers, so to  me, yes, it’s relatively new. It felt really important for this project because thinking about embodied  knowledge, the knowledge that we gain through everyday lived experience, but also the ways of  thinking and processing information through the body rather than just through the brain, so working  with dancers, that’s their language, and it’s taught me a lot. Working with dancers has been really  informative and interesting for me.  

Why is the installation called Soundings? What is the inspiration behind that? 

It’s called Soundings because originally, this was a long time ago, the work was going to be about a  woman called Marie Tharp and her work. Her map features in the film and in part of the exhibition  thats on at the minute in John Hansard Gallery. Her story is incredible. She’s a woman who, in the  fifties and sixties, mapped the Ocean floor without ever going to sea, and she was sent depth  Soundings. So until her work, pretty much everyone thought the Ocean floor was flat, a flat barren  landscape. It was only when scientists went out on these expeditions, women weren’t allowed out  on boats because they were deemed to be bad luck, so she would stay back in the lab in New York.  And they went out and did these transit lines and with sonar did these deck Soundings and these  calculations were sent back to Marie Tharp and it was amazing, she did hundreds and hundreds of  calculations so had this knowledge of the landscape Her father was a landscape surveyor so as a  child she used to go out with him when he was working. So from her childhood experiences, she had  this kind of knowledge of land and landscapes, but she was also a brilliant artist; if you look at her  maps, they’re just exquisite. She had this really unique combination of skills, which when it came  together, she was able to make the leap in a way and draw these canyons and crevices in the Ocean  floor and basically said it’s not flat, there are mountains. In the end, it kind of proved plate tectonic  theory, so it was a huge kind of paradigm shift in geophysics. So that’s where the idea came from for  ‘Soundings’. But it’s also about sounding the alarm. It’s also this idea of [how] there’s something new about  to happen here, it’s a new extractive industry. It’s not happened yet; it doesn’t have to happen. We  can stop it happening. But it’s not one of these things that is already going to, it’s kind of playing on  these things.

How did you go about filming the deep sea? I’m guessing you didn’t go yourself?  

No, sadly not. It’s still one of my missions in life to go down in a submersible, but no. I worked  closely with the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, here, and the National Atmospheric  and Oceanic Administration in the US, and Nautilus expeditions. So they’re big scientific  organisations that go out and do these deep sea expeditions. But nowadays humans don’t really go  down at all; they’re all remotely operated vehicles. They’re all operated from the cruise ship on the  surface, and they have kind of like a games controller. They have these consoles where they’re navigating, and they’ve got loads of cameras. It’s really incredible. So I worked with these science organisations, who were extremely generous in sharing their footage with me.  

On April 25th, Time Magazine released an article discussing Trump’s alleged plans to potentially ‘bypass international approval’ and mine in international waters. What would you hope the American government would take into consideration before making any decisions?

To listen to the science. Everyone else is kind of following due diligence by going about it in a precautionary way, saying we don’t know enough to know that it's okay to do. And there are a lot of projects out there at the moment where they are doing that stuff, where the footage is coming from, trying to work out what the impacts are and I think we really really need to listen to that. You know, look at the history of mining, it’s not been good and this is a space that is so big and so important to our lives that if we just plunder in there, it could have really devastating effects.

We kind of went over this when you were explaining your work, but a lot of people aren’t  aware of the deep sea mining issue. Why do you think it’s important that a wider community  invests in it?  

I think we should all know because it will affect all of us. The Ocean regulates our climate, it’s a  carbon sink, its doing so much work that we don’t think about in our own lives so it feels like what  is so amazing about the whole situation with deep sea mining is that we were at this sort of ‘it might  start’ situation two years ago and scientists and NGO’s really kind of like put their foot down and  just said ‘we don’t know, we don’t have enough scientific explanation to know whether we should  do this or not’. And it stalled it for two years. We are now at the end of those two years, but that can  happen again, so the more people that are vocal about it… like GreenPeace, WWF, NGOs are  doing amazing things, there are campaigns out there, there’s a moratorium that 32 countries have  signed. This kind of precautionary pause until we have enough scientific information. So it’s really  important that people know about it, they can sign petitions and help with the campaigning to stop it  happening.  

What do you hope an audience will take away from viewing your work?  

I think just knowing about it and thinking about the deep Ocean. There is so much going on in  today’s world, it’s another thing to think about, and I don’t want to shy away from that at all. We live  in incredibly difficult times at the moment. But at the same time, it’s such an amazing space, and as I  say, it’s doing so much for us without us ever thinking about it. We really, really need to look after it and protect it and think about the Ocean and its inhabitants as our kin or our cousin, rather than  thinking about it as this remote space, and that’s really what I want people to come away thinking  about. To come away thinking about the Ocean and its inhabitants as part of us and part of our  ecosystem that we live in.  

Soundings will be at Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts for the Brighton Festival between  Friday, May 16, and Friday, May 23. The installation without the performance is free. The installation with the performance will be £7, or the concession, which is applicable to university students, staff, and alumni, is £5.