OCEAN LAB
OCEAN LAB
Images: CURRENTS exhibition, Platform Arts, February 2024. Credit: Leiko Manalang-Frequin.
Ocean LAB merges art, science and technology to connect and engage the wider community to the seaweed biodiversity of Australia’s Great Southern Reef.
Ocean LAB is marine scientist Prue Francis and artists Vicki Hallett and Fiona Hillary. Through shared experiences of fieldwork, we are interested in how our collaboration can foster a sense of stewardship inviting participants and audiences to (re)imagine their oceanic entanglements. Ocean LAB is supported by Platform Arts.
Prue Francis is a Wadawurrung-based marine scientist specialising in seaweed cultivation techniques for improved seaweed restoration. Prue is passionate about raising awareness and knowledge about the Great Southern Reef to inspire marine stewardship.
Vicki Hallett is a Wadawurrung-based musician, field recordist, sound artist and composer. Her focus is to feature habitats and species and often utilises sounds we rarely or cannot hear. Vicki records subterranean, aquatic, and atmospheric sounds and creates works that reveal a wondrous world existing beyond our limited senses.
Fiona Hillary is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist/academic working in the public realm. Her passion lies in site-specific practices and the human/non-human/more-than-human relationships that reveal themselves across time.
THE WRACK
If you have ever visited one of the many beaches found along the 8000km stretch of southern Australian coastline – otherwise known as, the Great Southern Reef – then you have most likely come across “wrack”. Wrack is the collective noun for organic debris that has been deposited onto the beach from tides, winds and waves. Typically, the wrack along the Great Southern Reef coastline hosts a diverse range of seaweeds. Seaweeds are marine alga and provide oxygen, food and habitat to life underwater. The seaweeds of the Great Southern Reef are unique due to the diversity of species. There are over 1000 different species that have been identified so far! If you have ever explored underwater and seen the many different species of seaweeds, you would have observed the different colours, shapes and sizes of seaweeds. Seaweeds can be grouped on the main colours observed; green, brown and red.
Ocean LAB collaborate in the exploration of the wrack zone and through science, art and technology we explore this little known and often underrepresented zone through digital imagery and coastal sounds connected to the wrack.
Presented as part of the 2024 CURRENTS exhibition, OCEAN Lab’s artwork Wrack Entanglements invites you to experience the hidden wonders of the wrack zone—a world often imperceptible to our human senses. Utilising fieldwork equipment, Wrack Entanglements transforms the species of the wrack into an abstracted series of sounds and imagery, drawing attention to the intricate entanglements between the human, non-human, and the more-than-human in concert at the shoreline.
The work includes parabolic speakers which invite audiences to experience a composition of sound captured at Queenscliff and Portarlington, including anthropogenically generated sound from the arrival of a boat, snapping shrimp, a Port Jackson shark egg, wave motion, seagrasses and kelp. Abstracted imagery of microscopic captures from the wrack is projected in proximity to the first speaker in the gallery.
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