Sea Inside: Oceanic Interiority in Art and Visual Culture

This session takes an inward gaze towards the sea, exploring marine interconnections and immersion through interior spaces, whether architectural, bodily or imaginary. From nature writer Rachel Carson (1950) to Oceanian scholar and poet Teresia Teaiwa (1998), many have observed that the sea lives inside us, coursing through our blood, sweat and tears, a testament to shared oceanic origins. While humans evolved from the sea and are born from watery wombs, oceans are also associated with the inner spaces of the mind, with Freud famously labelling a state of psychic oneness the ‘oceanic feeling’.

In contrast to this sense of boundlessness, marine interiors have been theorised in terms of the bourgeois domesticity of the shell (Benjamin 1938), commodity fetishism in the underwater grotto and submarine (Olalquiaga 1999) and hapticality in the slave ship hold (Harney & Moten 2013). Many Indigenous and diasporic communities maintain intimate relationships to the sea, yet European and settler-colonial traditions have viewed it as an unknowable Other. The sublime ‘open sea’ and its seemingly fathomless depths dominate Western art history and marine imagery. Conversely, this session explores the ways oceans have been domesticated, reimagined on a bodily scale and brought inside the dry air of the gallery, whether to be tamed, contained or better understood.

Expanding on the research project Curating the Sea (2017-present), we invite papers examining these themes in art and visual-material culture across eras and regions ahead of our exhibition Sea Inside (Sainsbury Centre, UK, 2025) and with the aim of publishing an anthology.