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Katherine MagerSea Inside (2025) is an exhibition that emerged from Dr Sarah Wade (Associate Professor in Museum Studies, UEA) and Dr Pandora Syperek’s (Research Fellow, Loughborough University London/V&A) long-term collaborative research project Curating the Sea.
This research project began a decade ago in response to the wave of exhibitions about the oceans since the mid 2010s, charting and documenting this turn to the sea in artistic and curatorial practice and interrogating the fast-paced evolution of this work.
The project has so far resulted in a special issue of the Journal of Curatorial Studies (2020), the book Oceans: Documents of Contemporary Art (MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery, 2023), as well as numerous articles and public events in collaboration with museums, art organisations, curators and artists. The project has received funding variously from The Leverhulme Trust and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
The exhibition Sea Inside (2025) at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, turns the romantic notion of the sublime and expansive ocean that is so prevalent in Western art history on its head, instead investigating how contemporary artists have examined their entangled relationships with the sea and the ways the oceans have been tamed, contained and brought indoors to be better understood.
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Artworks selected for the show address four central themes that speak to the oceans’ role in cultures of display, domestic experience, the origins of life on earth, and their prevalence in myth and folklore across the world.
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Sea Inside includes a new sculpture commissioned especially for the show by artist Gabriella Hirst, whose artistic research has investigated myths of men being swallowed by whales as a reversal of whales being turned inside out in nineteenth-century industry and fashion. Emerging from an ongoing collaboration with Wade and Syperek, Hirst’s large polyester blind references whale baleen and is etched in a manner recalling scrimshaw to depict oceanic scenes from life as well as popular culture.
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The exhibition also includes a new acquisition for the Sainsbury Centre collection by Inuk artist Shuvinai Ashoona in the form of a large colour pencil drawing depicting the Goddess of the Sea, Sedna. Notably, among the 15 artists on show, three artworks were made especially for the exhibition.
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Through their curatorial research for Sea Inside as well as their academic inquiries in art history and curatorial studies, Wade and Syperek have uncovered the playful and immersive ways that artists address the serious topic of ocean ecology. Overall, the exhibition presents more-than-human, mythic and often quite humorous alternatives to a mode of documentary realism that has been prevalent in many climate-focussed exhibitions in recent times. It therefore provides different ways into engaging imaginatively and purposefully with the threats facing the oceans, offering what the art critic Nancy Durrant described in her 4-star review in The Times as ‘a salty twist on life under the waves’.
Wade and Syperek are continuing their research into the concept of ‘marine interiority’ in art and visual-material culture in response to new trends emerging in this field of exhibition-making. They have a new publication and workshop already planned once the exhibition Sea Inside closes its doors to the public.