Whales

With your annual pass you can experience this brand new exhibition where you’ll feel immersed to the depths of the ocean as Winchester Cathedral’s nave is transformed to home three whale sculptures.

In this art installation, Campbell Fraser will seek to unravel the interspecies communications between man and animal that are currently at the forefront of scientific research. She will create three monumental (5.2m, 4.6m and 3m respectively) sculptures of sperm whales which will hang from the nave ceiling. The nave’s wooden roof beams were often compared to the timbers of an upside down ship or boat, carrying subliminal associations with the industrial scale whaling which reduced sperm whale numbers to critical levels in the 19th century, when their waxy spermaceti oil famously oiled the wheels of the Industrial Revolution. The sculptures offer a response to the environment whereby the viewer becomes immersed into an imaginative world of the whale whilst the surroundings reflect man’s increasing ecological impact on the world’s climate.

Always fascinated by the physicality of substance, texture, form and space (both positive and negative), Campbell Fraser deliberately seeks out and employs sustainable, natural, recycled or repurposed materials. In this exhibition she is using recycled ghost netting, silk chiffon, latex, and synthetic (recycled) paper, made with almost no water. Using haptic techniques with these materials, she creates fluid, protean pieces in two-and three-dimensional forms to explain her dialogue between herself and nature.

Through collaborating with Project Ceti, 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. Over five years, this science-based experiment in Dominica has gathered vast amounts of Sperm Whale data, using underwear hydrophones to capture and record their distinctive ‘coda-clicks’. Along with studying their behaviour and methodologies to interpret the whales’ sounds. They have already discovered that whales have varying dialects and twenty-three different patterns of ‘coda-clicks’. AI has already been used to translate two unknown human languages without the need of a ‘Rosetta Stone’. Scientists are hopeful that it may be able to do the same with whale coda.

Campbell Fraser’s exhibition will seek 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. 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”. She has just returned from Dominica, where she swam with her beloved sperm whales and experienced an intense interaction with them,

Campbell Fraser is fascinated by this exploration of interspecies communication through decoding, but found her own immersive experience with the whales profoundly inspiring.

Campbell Fraser’s personal encounter with the whales does not take away from her excitement at the possibilities of science decoding or “the enormity of the breakthrough to mankind if we really can have an interspecies conversation – it could reshape how we coexist with nature.” In an artistic response to the science, Campbell Fraser has devised her own form of a Victorian Eidophone, using the vibrations of whales’ coda clicks to make her own visual interpretations of their conversations. These visceral responses float across and through transparent paper, echoed by mirrors suspended in space like an evocation of a fleeting spoken conversation. In another collaboration with a music technician, she also attempts to have her own- and the viewer’s- version of a conversation with the whales.

Through this immersion with her subject, Campbell Fraser has come to appreciate her own creative journey. Like many, she has often felt overwhelmed and moved to despair by the immensity of the crisis facing the world, but has discovered a poignant beauty in her own attempt to find answers. She went underwater to hear the whales and experienced a heartfelt, immense peace and connectedness in her realisation that she was a female floating amongst a pod of female whales. She experienced communication of a different kind as all her thoughts and motivations fell away, to be replaced by an immense stillness, gratitude and sense of humility in the company and grace of these magnificent slow-moving creatures.