The sculptor Tessa Campbell Fraser’s exhibition Whales- a Deeper Dialogue has drawn enthusiastic visitors to the Tithe Barn at Messums West, Wiltshire, England since its installation in October. The work, dominated by three half life-size sperm whales, suspended as if sleeping from the ancient oak beams of the barn, is at once a poignant reflection on the fragility of these noble and intelligent creatures in the face of global challenges and an exploration of the fascinating possibility of inter-species communication.

Whales- A Deeper Dialogue Exhibition

The exhibition moves this month from Messums West to the nave of Winchester Cathedral, the first of a number of cathedral installations planned for 2025.

www.winchester-cathedral.org.uk

Winchester Cathedral Test hang

Whales- a Deeper Dialogue seeks to unravel the interspecies communication between man and animal that is currently a hot topic in scientific research. Having earlier in her career had a major solo exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London featuring life-size hippos, elephants and a Polar Bear, Campbell Fraser’s latest work places the three  monumental whale sculptures (5.2m, 4.6m and 3m respectively) in an immersive sound and lightscape featuring silk banners hanging like sea kelp.

Natural History Museum London Solo Exhibition 2004

The banners are composed of beautiful images made by converting the sound vibrations of the whales’ ‘coda-click’ language- mixed in some cases with the artist’s own voice- into paintings.

Whales- A Deeper Dialogue Exhibition

The ‘Coda conversations’ images are made using a form of eidophone- a device normally consisting of a mouthpiece connected to a hollow chamber, over which is stretched a rubber membrane which vibrates with the sounds that are passed through it. Campbell Fraser uses the vibrating membrane to act as a form of brush, which she then manipulates across the paper surface to create the haunting paintings. The sounds captured in visual form in these unique ‘eidographs’ remain a mystery to us, their interpretation straddling the intersection between science and art.  In a sense, the banners represent an intriguing ‘Schrodinger’s cat’ of meaning, in that only in the future may we be able to translate their pulsating blue-green ripples into discernible speech from one of the oldest and most intelligent mammals on earth.

Whales- A Deeper Dialogue Exhibition

The sculptures, and the hanging banners, offer a response to the science and environment whereby the viewer becomes immersed into an imagined world of the whale and its communication and is invited to reflect on man’s increasing ecological impact on the world’s climate.

Coda Conversation Painting. 2024

Coda Conversation Painting. 2024

Campbell Fraser’s life has always been immersed in and informed by animals, science and nature, so that she sees little distinction between the human and animal worlds. As an artist, her engagement with animals has been total, spending hour upon hour sitting peaceably with her subjects, trying to understand them and longing for a total communication.  Her concern at man’s incursions into, and disruptions of, fragile ecosystems has led her into a challenging engagement with herself as human and animal.

Always fascinated by the physicality of substance, texture, form and space (both positive and negative), Campbell Fraser deliberately sought out and employed for the exhibition sustainable, natural, recycled or repurposed materials.  Using recycled ghost netting, silk chiffon, latex, and employing haptic techniques, she creates fluid, protean pieces in two-and three-dimensional forms to explain her dialogue between herself and nature. Through the tangled web of the hanging ghost netting emerges a flickering image of the whale, one minute semi-transparent, the next an opaque mass, suspended in a deep blue water mirage created by the 16 banner paintings, all to the surrounding accompaniment of whale sounds. The exhibition weaves artistic and scientific strands that do not seek to explain the whale but rather to convey the mystery and what we may learn from them by immersing ourselves in their alien world and highlighting the critical role biodiversity plays in our woven and global ecosystem.

Her materials are intrinsic to the theme of her work. “In sculpting the Whales as I have – transparently, using ghost netting, I want to convey the need for mankind to realise that these great beasts will not be around in our world if we do not act now to prevent pollution and global warming. For the sperm whales, the discarded nets and debris, noise pollution and boat strikes are all potential threats to its survival, while the rising sea temperatures will disrupt the entire ecological balance and possibly cause a huge numbers of sea creatures to become mere ghost to us, transparent in the extreme. And yet even within the whale’s story we can learn from nature. When a whale dies, its carcass, which has accumulated carbon during its long life, sinks to the bottom of the ocean, locking away 33 tons of CO2”

Whales- A Deeper Dialogue Exhibition

Scientific research into interspecies communication is focussed on the Caribbean Island of Dominica, where scientists from CETI are seeking to unravel the ‘coda click’ sounds in the hope of achieving the first ever interspecies communication. Shane Gero, Project CETI’s whale biology lead, has been gathering data (using underwater hydrophones), on the sound coda, social lives and behaviour of the sperm whales there. Once all the data and context information are collected, the scientists will try to decode it using cutting edge machines, AI learning, and linguistics methodologies. AI has already been used to translate between two unknown human languages without the need of a Rosetta Stone, and researchers have already discovered that whales have varying dialects and 23 different types of click coda patterns, so they are hopeful of a breakthrough.

Coda Conversation Painting. 2024

Campbell Fraser has incorporated the science of communication into her art. This has invigorated her creative response to her subject and her yearning for interconnection.

Her work seeks to weave both artistic and scientific strands to convey the mystery of the sperm whale, a creature that seems tantalisingly intelligible and yet remains so alien to us.

Coda Conversation painting.2024

She has always sensed that she cannot sculpt what she cannot see or feel, as she needs to be “present and listening” to “reveal what is beautiful, and the potential in nature for us to learn from”. To this end she has immersed herself in the exploration of sperm whales under the inspired guidance of renowned Sperm Whale expert Professor Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University. He advised her on their complex social lives, their expressions of love, suffering and compassion.  These are mammals, with the largest brains on the planet and live, like humans, in tightly knit family groups.

The artist swimming with Sperm Whales in Dominica.

Campbell Fraser visited Dominica, where she swam with her beloved sperm whales and experienced an intense interaction with them: “I didn’t quite know what to expect, being face-to-face with these giant creatures in their environment.  I hoped I would hear them coda click, and indeed I did, but it wasn’t just these sounds that gave me the intense feeling of an inter-species communication; it was more the fact that I was one female in a group of other predominantly female beings, and I felt part of their clan. I had no sensation that I didn’t belong in the underwater world or that we were alien to each other, or that I was in any way in danger.  It was almost as if we’d come from the same beginnings.  Perhaps we have- after all, sperm whales have finger-like digits in the pectoral fin, skin-like texture on their bodies and the remains of a leg bone in their blubber, left over from 50 million years ago when they were walking land animals.

Campbell Fraser is fascinated by the exploration of interspecies communication through decoding, but found her own immersive experience with the whales profoundly inspiring: “Really, what I experienced in those moments was a far more knowing conversation about myself, my personal views of being a woman today- perhaps I was connecting, like the Inuit people do, on a deeper and more spiritual level, with these magnificent mammals.  I certainly surfaced from the water with a clear message from our encounter that in order to exist peacefully and fulfilled in this world, I would do well to listen to this ancient tongue with its truly primeval message.  A romantic I may be, but it certainly made me realise this world is uniquely special and worth saving.”

Campbell Fraser’s personal encounter with the whales does not take away from her excitement at the possibilities of science decoding ‘whale-speak’ or ‘the enormity of the breakthrough for mankind if we really can have an interspecies conversation – it could reshape how we coexist with nature.’

Through this immersion with her subject, Campbell Fraser has come to appreciate her own creative journey, echoing the Romantic concept of the Sublime, the belief that, ‘every person, upon seeing a grand object, is affected with something which as it were extends his very being and expands it to a kind of Immensity’[1]. In her art she interconnects and delves into the idea of the ‘breath’ of natural phenomena, which links to the breath of every living creature and to the Gaia Hypothesis[2]   She explores her relationship with ‘remote’, ineffable land- and seascapes, which evoke ‘something greater than ourselves’[3] – the ‘sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused’[4]

Bishop and Bear.  Bronze Edition.

Like many, she has often felt overwhelmed by Global Warming or species extinction, so through her art she tries and unravel it. In other artworks, she seeks to capture the fragility of a recently discovered ancient foal with skin and fur intact – encased in ice for 42,000 years only to now be revealed as the glaciers melt and retreat- or to expose the void left by the extinction of near endangered animals through the empty skin of a Polar Bear. She wants to articulate the timespan of their voices and understand the fundamental and spiritual emotions that come with their existence. With the visceral energy of her work, she wants to create a discourse between the cuteness of the animal and the macabreness of its remains and by using natural but connected materials like beeswax, horse hair, fur, sheep wool, plaster, and hemp fabric, together with underlying research, she hopes to amplify these messages.

I Keep thinking he will return.2023

The Revenant 2023

In a final footnote, she would welcome the possibility of new collaborations with scientists exploring interspecies communications or symbiotic learning exploration between human and non-human beings and the natural world. Please do feel free to contact her via her email tessa@roryb.net

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1. John Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime, 1747

2. The Gaia hypothesis, formulated by John Lovelock, proposes that ‘living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet’

3. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary, 2010, p.363

4. William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, July 1798

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www.tessacampbellfraser.co.uk

All images copyright and courtesy of Tessa Campbell Fraser

Art, Creativity, Ecology, Installation, Nature, Science, Sculpture, Water