WHALE ENCOUNTERS BY SOPHIA NICOLOV
WHALE ENCOUNTERS BY SOPHIA NICOLOV
In Response to the Exhibition
HERE BE WHALES EXPLORING WHALE REPRESENTATIONS
Curated by MARTHA CATTELL, HONDARTZA FRAGA, SOPHIA NICOLOV
With the Artists HELEN CANN, MARTHA CATTELL, ANGELA COCKAYNE, FILIPPA DOBSON, HONDARTZA FRAGA, CAROLINE HACK, KATHY PRENDERGAST AND MARINA REES
Leeds & Hull 2019
Marina Rees, Blue Whale Prints
I trace the traces of whales.
I trace the traces of “the whale�, whatever the whale might be.
Marina Rees, Blue Whale Stamp
Newspaper articles, novels, poems, memoirs, historical accounts, academic articles, scientific research papers. All of these bring me closer to the elusive animals but still keep me at a distance. I visit museums, archives and spend hundreds of hours trawling through websites. I go to conferences and talks and seek out specialists who might speak to me, picking their brains for expert insights. In my hunt for new knowledge, I have travelled to the other side of the world to British Columbia; I went whale watching, collected whale ephemera from coastal towns on Vancouver Island and took a course called ‘In Pursuit of the Whale’. Like so many others, that is exactly what I am – in pursuit of the whale. The material animals drift in and out of focus and despite my best efforts, the numinous creature pervades.
Hondartza Fraga, Natural Habitat, night-vision photograph
For three and a half years now, I have dedicated my life to the academic research of whales – more specifically, their strandings. I am obsessed with their deaths, especially those that humans encounter on the shoreline, that liminal contact zone, the perpetually shifting borderland that oscillates between terra firma and sea. I am not a scientist but a historian trying to make sense of the myriad human perceptions of whales, their stranding events and the marine ecosystems they dwell in. I often find myself working in the grey area between disciplines, piecing together material from the sciences, the humanities and the arts.
Martha Cattell, Capturing Whales, collages
Strandings are both real and metaphorical auguries of the health of a species and the wider marine environment. I hope that our fascination with strandings and the scientific insights gathered from them will further awareness of the impact of humans on the oceans and the species that reside within. This is my contribution to enriching our understandings of these creatures that were hunted and overexploited to the very limits less than a lifetime ago. This is my contribution to the conversation around the Anthropocene in the hope that these animals will not simply become traces, humanity’s memories and regrets.
Yet I have never seen a living great whale. Blue, fin, right, humpback, bowhead, sperm, gray, sei, Bryde’s, minke.
Caroline Hack, Right Whale, Left Flipper
Kathy Prendergast, The Whales travel the World, Stamps on paper
The closest I have come is seeing a pod of orcas in Barkley Sound, just off the Pacific coast of Vancouver Island. Often mistaken for whales, orcas are part of the Delphinidae order – the oceanic dolphin family. They are awe-inspiring in their own respect, but they are not whales as such. Orcas, because of their size and their status as potent symbols of the ocean and harmful human activity, have an unstable position in the popular imagination. They are perceived as whales in popular culture and are simultaneously known to science as the largest dolphin species. Culturally mediated in the extreme, the real animal before me is shrouded in perceptions and misconceptions, histories, mass media and everything else I have seen and read. We were told that the orcas we saw were likely to be K-pod, part of the endangered southern residents – a genetically distinct group of orcas. There were 20, 30, perhaps even 40 of the monochrome cetaceans ahead of us. We never got very close. The distance felt appropriate, as though the animals could carry on doing their own thing as the engine was cut and the boat drifted along. Watching through the binoculars, I could see dozens of sleek, shining black dorsal fins cutting through the surface of the water.
I can understand why so many people describe encounters with these animals as sublime. I watched them breaching, slapping their tails and the clouds of mist as they spouted. My words cannot do justice to how beautiful it was. It was unbelievable and yet it is one of my most potent memories. I described it to a friend back in London as ‘really humbling and moving in a way that just made you so glad that there are animals in the world like that’. It is a sentiment that I carry with me. While I may not get a chance to encounter orcas again, there is something about knowing that they are there. For now, at least. Awareness that this pod, like so many others, is threatened with extinction is sobering. I cannot comprehend oceans without them.
Caroline Hack, Wondrous Whale
Helen Cann, We Dream of Blue Whales (1: Islandia. 2: Forayer. 3: Scandia)
It is not often that one is truly humbled by an experience. But it happened to me twice while I was on Vancouver Island. The encounter with the orcas was the first. The second was when I visited Kiixin, . the ancient whaling village and capital of the Huu-ay-aht Nation of the Nuuchah-nulth indigenous peoples of this region. First Nation communities on Vancouver Island have relationships with gray whales, humpback whales, orcas and other cetaceans stretching back thousands of years. The structures at Kiixin . have been carbon dated as more than 5,000 years old and was inhabited until 1880. These animals have had complex cultural and spiritual significance for thousands of years with traditions and knowledge being passed down through generations. We listened to our guide, Wisqii, sing and recount oral histories as we sat on the beach and as we stood in an ancient longhouse that was once a family dwelling, the wooden beams towering over us. Such a direct lineage of information and experience is immense. As we walked, there were remnants of whales here and there, rib bones and vertebrae of long-dead animals.
Huu-ay-aht’s ancient whaling village, Vancouver Island, July 2018 Photograph by Sophia Nicolov
Sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus), Female Natural History Museum, London, July 2016. Photograph by Sophia Nicolov
Growing up in London, living whales are the stuff of imagination, of nature documentaries and stories. Living great whales remain beyond me and I have only seen their skeletal remains. While bones are signifiers of death, they offer me access to lives lived in seas and oceans around the world. London, Hull, Edinburgh, Orkney. United Kingdom. Bamfield, Ucluelet, Tofino, Vancouver. Canada. These are the places where I have seen the bones of whales. Most of these cetacean remains come from the bodies of animals that have stranded. Humans shape the afterlives of these whales. These are vastly different from the afterlives of whales that strand away from human civilization or whales that die in the ocean and sink to stygian depths where the body can support organisms for months, sometimes years. Natural processes shape those afterlives. The animals have no significance to us. But the bones we retain have individual value, identities and meanings.
When I began researching sperm whale strandings on Britain’s North Sea coast, I discovered the central role of the Natural History Museum, London, in responding to beached whales and storing their remains. I met with the Principal Curator, Richard Sabin, who is also a cetacean and stranding expert and he invited me to visit the Museum’s research collection. This trip is one of the most important of my career. Richard shared his tremendous knowledge and passion for whales with me and helped to bring my thesis and the entire subject alive. This visit and the conversation we had continue to influence my thinking. Listening to his first-hand accounts of strandings made the theoretical more tangible. Whale strandings are not simply an intellectual exercise. Dwarfed by gigantic skulls, vertebrae and jawbones, I grasped the reality of the great whales’ size for the first time. I was captivated not only by their size but because their physicality gave me insight into the sheer immensity of the oceanic environment that they reside in. I have never witnessed a stranding, but I began to comprehend what being confronted with such a large animal on a beach might be like. As I stood in the storeroom lined with skeletons, I
was confronted with the material reality of these animals and I could not help but think about the vast amount of animal biomass that was lost through centuries of whaling.
Marina Rees, Osseous Landscapes (video stills)
The morbid stillness frames my encounter.
Bones are visual markers of mortality and no matter how skilfully rearticulated, they do not resemble living whales. I remember staring at a sperm whale skull in the storeroom and thinking how without the thick layers of muscle, blubber and skin, it is near impossible to imagine the sperm whale’s distinct shape from the bare skeleton. In particular, the orb-like head was a world away from the concave skull before me which was missing the huge spermaceti organ that rests in this space carved out by nature. Marina Rees, Osseous Landscapes (video stills)
Moby’s skull, National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, September 2018 Photograph by Sophia Nicolov
In September 2018, on my way to Orkney, I passed through Edinburgh so that I could make a pilgrimage to the National Museum of Scotland where a sperm whale skull of great significance to me sits on display. The skull belongs to ‘Moby’, a juvenile male sperm whale that stranded in the Firth of Forth in 1997. I had discovered him while searching through newspaper archives early in 2016. I read articles about him, watched old news footage and spent over a year writing and thinking about him. I transformed this animal into one of my central case studies, ruminating on what his stranding and the retention of his skeleton meant and continues to signify to people. There was such anticipation as I made my way to where he sits in the main hall. Moby’s skull is beautiful. Bleached, off-white, cream, ochre. The curve of the different bones and the intricacies of the structure drew me in. A culmination of millions of years of evolution and one of the most highly adapted species for life thousands of metres below the surface. The skull was huge and I found myself completely unable to imagine how large these animals must be when alive.
I thought of the image of his vast, lifeless body stranded on the mudflats and pitied the whale.
I felt a connection to Moby even though I know that there is not one. Writing about an animal does not automatically form a bond. But I cannot help it. Perhaps it feels so significant because it was a moment of de-intellectualising my research, a switch from words to the material animal.
Angela Cockayne, String Theory. Pewter, String, Rawhide, 50cm40cm
Martha Cattell, Capturing Whales, collage
Filippa Dobson, Wings of Desire, June 2010
Designed by Hondartza Fraga Published by East Street Arts All texts and images Š the authors, 2019 No part of this book may be reproduced without permission Cover: Angela Cockayne, White House, Giclee Blueprint Inner cover: Hondartza Fraga, The Secondhand Whale More info: herebewhales.wordpress.com This exhibition and publication have been possible thanks to an award from the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH), with support from the University of Leeds, University of York, Hull Maritime Museum, Left Bank Leeds and East Street Arts.
ISBN 978-1-906470-17-3