The sea is often portrayed, in art, as either a surface or a boundary – something to scud over or gaze upon, the “out there” viewed from the “over here”. But as seas rise, bleach, and become highways for desperate people seeking new forms of life, there is a sense that human culture cannot afford for the sea to remain at a distance. A new exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre, Sea Inside, looks at how the seas have been domesticated, brought inside or alongside bodies, houses and art practices that use onland life as a way to breach the distance between out there and in here. After all, we’re sea-like beings; we are 70% water, and tugged in tides by the moon. 

Art might well offer the only way to see the ocean as many things, instead of a single ecosystem or gleaming metaphor. As the curators Pandora Syperek and Sarah Wade note in their introduction to Oceans, a curation of texts on the seas, “art and curation – with their capacity for interdisciplinarity and multimodality – are uniquely equipped to address oceanic boundlessness.”

At the exhibition, a beautiful work by Gabriella Hirst takes the form of a scrimshaw carving – the ivory carvings invented by idle whalers in the 18th century – engraved shimmeringly onto window blinds. These delicate etchings, lit from behind, depict swirls of sea life. I thought I heard a whale song emitting from a room within the room created by red curtains, but on stepping inside, I encountered a video depicting a naked Marcus Coates, curled up in a bath. A screen affixed to another wall shows Skye Turner running down the road dressed as Lady Sockeye, a performance character in the form of a human-sized salmon. Accompanying drawings show a sad salmon next to the text “MADE THE ROOM HEAVY + WET”. 

Sea Inside is part of a six-month network of exhibitions and events currently running at the Sainsbury Centre, under the title of Can the Seas Survive Us? Downstairs, a solo show by Yuki Kihara titled Darwin in Paradise Camp is a riotous intervention into the artistic work of Gauguin, and the biological legacy of Charles Darwin. Kihara turns the dryness of Victorian socio-biological legislation into something much wetter, transforming Darwin himself to a coral-coloured drag queen, the orange of a clownfish. In this work, and in Sea Inside, the sea is liberated from its poetic chains – Matthew Arnold’s “turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery” – to become funny, and consequently agential. But this doesn’t mean it’s flippant. Back in Sea Inside, a row of tiny glass vials is fixed to the wall, each one holding a minuscule frond of algae. These vials are filled with the artist Kasia Molga’s tears, with spidery handwriting noting the reason for each (“stress, 26.05.2023”). They become briny ecosystems for sustaining life (tears are about 0.6% salt, to the sea’s 3%). The wall text proposes that the work communicates a desire for new life to emerge from devastation – something the exhibition as a whole dares to hope for, too. .

“Sea Inside” runs at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, until 26 October 2025.