Klodin Erb, Mermaids #14, 2023. Photo: Stefan Altenburger
When the breeze is mild and the sun is gently warming the pebbles, it can’t be that easy to entice the ice-cream guzzlers on Hastings seafront into a gallery. Hastings Contemporary has adopted a simple strategy — it’s brought the sea inside.
Combining paintings, prints, drawings and objects from across cultures and eras, Undersea takes you on a journey beneath the waves. The oldest item, a print portraying the whales, fish and hunters of Greenland, dates from 1705; the most recent, Chioma Ebinama’s compellingly odd watercolours, including a scene of mermaids swarming what looks like a drowning horse, were made last year.
We’re obsessed, aren’t we? When humpback whales were sighted along the Sussex coast this year, people flocked there as if the Loch Ness monster had made an appearance. More than 80 per cent of our planet’s ocean remains unexplored and is as mysterious as the expanses depicted on ancient maritime maps, which were stuffed with improbable creatures. Some appear here — William de Morgan’s rampant hippocamp (a tile design), for example, and Christopher Wood’s blue-skinned sirens, aggressively grabbing the ropes of Ulysses’ ship.
Mermaids feature heavily alongside their sister sea nymphs and water spirits, such as Kelechi Nwaneri’s Mami wata. Pen Dalton’s 1985 screenprint The Little Mermaid uses images by the artist Allen Jones, known for his fetishised depictions of women, to conflate Hans Christian Andersen’s disturbing tale about a woman mutilating herself for a man with the medical procedure of liposuction.
The painter Klodin Erb’s Mermaids series, made under lockdown in landlocked Switzerland, is particularly wild. In a glittery, vivid palette inspired by American mermaid pageants (an actual thing), they bask in the sun, take part in synchronised swimming displays and observe UFOs.
But the underwater world is strange enough without mythical creatures. Artists love a lobster, from Charles Collins’s 1738 crustacean (Lobster on a Delft Dish) to Oskar Kokoschka’s dynamic 1946 watercolour, while octopuses occupy a special place in our fears. Michael Armitage’s bright red creature lies in wait for a boat of fishermen to wreak revenge and in Taiso Yoshitoshi’s 1870 woodcut, a female abalone diver wrestles with one, the unchanging blue of the surrounding ocean enveloping the violent struggle in silence.
The art historian James Russell curates with a light touch, eschewing excess text and liberating the visitor to make thematic and visual connections between the ways we view this enigmatic universe. Dive in, the water’s lovely.
Hastings Contemporary, March 29 to September 14, hastingscontemporary.org
