DUNDEE.- Home to Dundee’s nationally significant whaling collections, including the famous Tay Whale, The McManus is showcasing a poignant installation that asks what can we do today to protect these majestic creatures.

Mella Shaw is an artist and an environmental activist using themes of balance, fragility and loss to raise awareness and inspire change. In Sounding Line her focus is on the overuse of marine sonar which is having a devastating effect on particularly deep-diving whale species that rely on echolocation. This sonar is used by the military and by companies searching for new gas and oil reserves.

This body of work was the artist’s response to a devastating mass beaching of nearly a hundred dead whales across the Hebrides and West Coast of Scotland and Ireland in 2018 – that was largely unreported at the time.

Taking its name from the sounding line, a length of rope with a weight used to measure the depth of water, Sounding Line is an immersive ceramic installation made up of large-scale sculptural forms inspired by whales’ tiny inner-ear bones. They are made from a unique clay body using whale bone ash - the same way cow bones have been used for centuries to make bone china. With permission from NatureScot, Mella used the remains of a Northern bottlenose whale beached on the West Coast of Scotland.

In the installation, Mella wraps her sculptures in red marine rope that resonate with sonar pulse. Encouraged to touch the ropes, visitors will feel vibrations, reflecting how marine life experience sonar underwater.

The installation is accompanied by a short film documenting a return journey taking one of the unfired sculptural forms back into the sea in South Uist, Outer Hebrides, where it slowly dissolved in the sea water.

Mella Shaw’s poetic installation is now staged in Dundee, Britain’s leading whaling port in the second half of the nineteenth century. Dundee’s whaling past is not only reflected in the collection at The McManus, but in the City around it, from street names like East Whale Street and Candle Lane to public art, including Alistair Smart’s Whale’s Teeth on Polepark Road or Lee Simmons’ Tay Whale on the Waterfront.

Sounding Line won the prestigious Award 2023 prize at the British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent which is the highest award for ceramics in the UK.

Speaking ahead of the exhibition Mella said: “There's a long history of artists using the imagery of beached whales as a symbol for impending disaster for example in 17th-century Dutch etchings. A whale on land is seen as a reversal of natural order and therefore they are seen as harbingers of doom. Thinking about this current point in climate crisis, a beached whale is a potent image. These majestic creatures have been ejected from their natural habitat due to human activity alone. This work is about the effect of sonar pollution on whales but it is also about the bigger issue of humans' detrimental impact on every single ecosystem on the planet.

Over the last ten years, I've been making work about the climate and ecological crisis that we find ourselves in. Sounding Line is about the mass beaching events of whales that have been happening all across Britain, but particularly in Scotland. One of the main reasons behind it is this increase in the use of sonar to search for enemy submarines and also to search for new oil and gas reserves. I had the idea to make some clay using beached whale bone – much like bone-china is made using cow bone.

I had lots of ideas of different things I could make and it wasn't until I was actually sketching from the different parts of the whale's skulls that I found these incredible and tiny inner ear bones. I've taken those shapes as a starting point and blown them up massively in size. I want them to be mysterious and ambiguous in their form, so they've actually become quite a lot more bodily than the original shapes. This also reflects the amorphous shapes of the whales as they decompose on the shore.

The ceramic forms are wrapped in vivid red marine ropes that vibrate with a pulse based on sonar. People who visit the exhibition will not be able to hear the sonar but instead feel it through their bodies when they touch the rope. That way they have a kind of bodily experience of what it feels like to be a whale disorientated by the sonar. The whole project is a consciousness raising exercise to draw attention to this form of pollution that very few people know about.”

At the British Ceramics Biennial Award presentation in October 2023, Alun Graves, Chair of the Award selection panel and the V&A’s Senior Curator, Ceramics and Glass 1900–now, commented: “Mella Shaw’s Sounding Line is a truly exceptional and remarkable work, powerful in concept and majestic in execution. It represents in every aspect an extraordinary feat of making, rendering a work that is both poetic and sublimely beautiful, but also confronting and unequivocal in its message. Mella Shaw has realised a work of huge ambition, demonstrating the potency of ceramics and its ability to engage with the issues of our time.”

Anna Day, Head of Libraries and Cultural Services at Leisure & Culture Dundee, said “It is fitting that in Dundee, a coastal city with a rich maritime heritage, Mella Shaw’s beautiful work invites us to reflect on our past and consider how we can all help shape a more sustainable future for the city.”