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The ocean is the largest biosphere present on planet Earth, containing a diverse array of organisms that call the waves home. While the waters are interconnected, its pure scale creates different zones of life with biodiversity unique to each realm. The dive into our exhibition begins at the surface, exploring the vibrant biodiversity of the epipelagic zone.
Guy Harvey's illustration of pelagic fish perfectly captures the rush of energy out at the high seas, while intricate felt and ceramic works of ‘ Changing Seas III ‘ visualise the tranquil yet everso teeming ecosystem of tropical coral reefs. Moving down into the midnight zone, vigour quickly converts to the fear of the unknown - where toothy predators lie in an eat-or-be-eaten world. Else Bostelmann’s haunting portrayal of the concealed depths amplifies the mystery that looms behind the thick black curtains of seawater. Plunging through the horrors of the deep, the dive comes to an end at the hadal zone. This world confined in eternal darkness conveys a strange sense of solemnity, fostering a family of crustaceans, worms and fish that turn bones to ashes and bodies to dust.
Concluding our plunge across the ocean depths, the second part of this exhibition delves into the visual techniques and methods of depicting marine life. Throughout history, our ways of showcasing and communicating information about the ocean have been just as diverse as its aquatic residents. From Haeckel’s ancient stone lithographs to José Luis De Vicente’s digital marine exhibits, we will explore how visual techniques and technology shape our knowledge and connection to deep sea creatures. While marine wildlife inspires art, they also provide insight into the Earth’s evolutionary history and global ecosystem, informing conservation efforts. By studying the portrayal of these creatures, not only will we learn more about nature itself, we will also rediscover humanity’s unending fascination towards the mysteries of our world.
A Plunge to the depths below: Marine biodiversity through an artistic lens
(Calvin & Brandon)
Guy Harvey, Bull Market,
26 X 40 inches on Watercolour, Guy Harvey collection, 2021.
The epipelagic zone, often called the open ocean, is a sunlit, kinetic world where life thrives in vivid motion. Here, fish like anchovies and sardines shimmer in tight schools, warping in response to swift predators like sailfish and Mahi-mahi. Guy Harvey’s Bull Market captures this dazzling energy with cinematic precision. His vibrant palette and muscular brushwork convey the motion, abundance, and clarity of this surface layer.
Mahi-mahi gleam in pursuit of rainbow runners, while a sailfish haunts the background. Sargassum weed floats near the surface, teeming with biodiversity—its role as both shelter and hunting ground subtly portrayed. Through Harvey’s hyperrealism, the epipelagic becomes a site of human familiarity and longing: a zone of sunlight, sport, and control, where the ocean is most visible and interactive.
Courtney Mattison, Our Changing Seas III, Glazed stoneware and porcelain, 2014, 108 x 156 x 22 inches, Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery.
Courtney Mattison's Our Changing Seas III (2014) is a large-scale ceramic wall installation—modeled on living staghorn coral and now forever housed in Florida at Nova Southeastern University's Oceanographic Center. Stretching 15 feet from end to end, its hand-sculped, petroglyph glazed ceramic forms convey both the complexity and fragility of reef ecosystems: a visual effect far beyond anything most field observations could achieve. Armed with a background in both marine ecology and ceramics, Mattison mixes scientific rigor with artistic sensitivity to create a miniature reef.
The piece draws the viewer's eye out from a vivid center full of purples and blues to a dull, bleached white perimeter. This chromatic gradient is a reflection of coral bleaching due to higher ocean temperatures, showing ecological suffering in spatial terms. Mattison’s preference for texture increases the effect: working with common items like chopsticks, the surface shows jagged ridges, bulbous nodes, and fine fans - visually stamping different coral morphologies.
Mattison both captures its life and its precariousness. It becomes a living archive recording what remains and what is vanishing. Her choice of enduring materials to depict a vanishing ecosystem is in precise harmony with this exhibition's meditation upon marine life and its pictorial recording.
Christine and Margaret Wertheim, Pittsburgh Satellite Reef, Crocheted yarn and recycled materials, 2023, Dimensions variable, Charity Randall Gallery, Carnegie Museum of Art.
How does the use of soft, malleable materials like yarn in the Pittsburgh Satellite Reef challenge our expectations of scientific accuracy in representing marine life?
As part of the global Crochet Coral Reef project, Christine and Margaret Wertheim and the Institute for Figuring, the Pittsburgh Satellite Reef (2023) sprawls across the Carnegie Museum of Art. A huge fiber installation, the reef is the product of community workshops with hundreds of people from Pittsburgh. Made from yarn and recycled materials, it's made of vividly crocheted coral structures. Towering and tactile, the installation transforms an institutional space into an immersive marine landscape, scaled not to the ocean, but to the human body. Formally the work is based in hyperbolic geometry, which is a same non-linear structure found in actual coral growth. Not privileging any one focal point, the eye is instead taken in a swirl of coiled tendrils, bulging knots, and lacy fans. This decentralized view mirrors the ecology of an actual reef. The viewer must move around and into the sculpture to experience the way it uses space.
Color serves a dual function, both aesthetic and symbolic. Exuberant reds, oranges, and yellows suggest life; patches of stark white and gray denote bleached coral. This chromatic contrast is an invitation to ponder the degradation of marine environments. But most of all, it is a work about texture and toil. Every form is hand-made, every stitch a testament to time and care. The reef becomes not merely a biological archive but also a cultural one - at a juncture where mathematical form, craft practice, and environmental activism converge in one vision of collective renewal.
Jason deCaires Taylor, The Coral Greenhouse, Marine-grade stainless steel and pH-neutral cement, 2019, 12 x 9 x 6 meters, Museum of Underwater Art.
Jason deCaires Taylor's The Coral Greenhouse (2019) is not simply a sculpture: it is an engineered ecosystem, 18 feet under the sea surface at John Brewer Reef off Queensland 's coast. By using pH-neutral cement, stainless steel and glass to build this 12-meter-long underwater living art installation, he hopes that in time it will gradually be transformed by marine organisms. As coral polyps, algae, and fish slowly occupy its surfaces, the work blurs the line between art and environment.
The installation is modelled on a symmetrical greenhouse. In it are life-size sculptures of children engaged in acts of observation and care — gestures of scientific stewardship. The structure's rigid geometry contrasts with that of the nearby coral reefs, where organic chaos reigns. This invites an exploration of not only terrestrial cultivation but also aquatic fertility. With light streaming in from above, it moves across the surface of the water as day turns to night, turning the space into a constantly changing visual spectacle.
Unlike Mattison's ceramics, where the symbolic or construction of a living archive comes through his craftsmanship, or the Wertheims' crocheted coral which are both beautiful and practical, but disconnected from the fact that all major personal accomplishments in this field have been purely theoretical until now, Taylor's work is literally a living archive. Time and biology have an effect on color, form, and material. The Coral Greenhouse is not just a representation of marine recovery but actually enacts it. By doing so, it collapses the boundary between observer and ecosystem, artist and reef. Through its very existence within and upon nature–as part of the life held in human care, not something which might lead to greater tragedy–it argues powerfully that we still have potential for repair.
Else Bostelmann, Two Deep Sea Creatures Swim Around the Bathysphere, 1934.
Gouache on black paper, 14¼ x 11¼ in.
Descending into the bathypelagic zone, Else Bostelmann’s Two Deep Sea Creatures Swim Around the Bathysphere plunges us into a realm of eerie beauty and spectral menace. Unlike energy and life bursting through the Bull market or ecological vibrance visible in the Pittsburgh Satelite reef, the midnight zone strikes the eyes with a void - a darkness that is only illuminated through the small framed window of the bathysphere, circled by creatures unknown.
Her deep-sea illustration blends scientific accuracy with ghostly stylization, where photophores glow like metaphors for fragmented knowledge. The toothy creatures drift in solitude through shadowy waters, embodying mystery, survival, and deep-sea evolution.
Bostelmann’s fine lines and reverent touch convey both our curiosity and unease, —echoing how this “midnight zone” remains suspended between myth and science. The simple vertical composition reflects a slower, more solitary life, where each organism is adapted not for speed but for endurance, patience, and resilience in an alien world humans can only partially illuminate.
Tanya Young, Rosebud Whale Fall, Oil paint on canvas on panel, 27 x 40″, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 2021.
Tanya Young, Rosebud Whale Fall, Oil paint on canvas on panel, 27 x 40″, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 2021.
As we reach the deepest depths of the hadal zone, the atmosphere shifts from predator and prey to quiet ritual. Tanya Young’s Rosebud Whale Fall depicts a whale carcass resting on the seafloor, surrounded by scavengers and painted in soft hues of pink and violet. Unlike the chaotic chase of upper zones, this space is still, almost sacred. Organic remains become sustenance in a slow, cyclical economy of life and decay. Young’s watercolor medium and floral tones evoke not decay but renewal—transforming death into something poetic. Her work captures the hadal not as a void but as a profound ecosystem where loss feeds hidden life.
In this reverent portrayal, the viewer is invited to linger—not in fear, but in reflection. The hadal zone, so often imagined as inhospitable or alien, is rendered with unexpected tenderness. Each organism circling the whale—hagfish, amphipods, bone-eating worms—takes on a role not just as decomposer but as mourner and participant in a communal rite. By framing decomposition as both necessary and beautiful, Rosebud Whale Fall challenges us to reconsider the narratives we assign to death and deep-sea life alike. It is not merely a depiction of ecological function, but a memorial in watercolor, on how beauty and meaning persist even in the planet’s darkest corners.
Paint, paper, glass, and fish bones: Bringing sea creatures to life with techniques and technology (Claire & Ariana)
Ernst Haeckel, Plate II: Family Stannomide, Genus Stannophyllum, 1889.
Before advanced photographic techniques became widespread, scientists documented their observations through hand-illustrated drawings. In the early 1900s, Ernst Haeckel, a German zoologist, published a collection of meticulous, colorful chromolithographs based on deep sea specimens collected from the HMS Challenger expedition. The expedition lead to the discovery of 4,700 new species, while Haeckel’s illustrations further engaged the public in the field of oceanography and ignited the scientific community’s interest in marine research.
Chromolithography, an illustration technique invented in the 19th century, involves carving multiple plates of stone and inking each plate with different colors, then printing each plate over the same paper to create a complex image. In this plate from “Report on Deep-sea Keratosa,” Haeckel intertwines science and art to showcase the tissue structures in sea sponges, jellyfish, and other deep sea invertebrates. The use of chromolithography allowed Haeckel to add intricate shading and patterns, creating the illusion of depth and porous textures, bringing these wild and wondrous creatures to life.
Else Bostelmann, Saber-toothed Viper fish (Chauliodus sloanei) Chasing Ocean Sunfish (Mola mola) larva. Watercolor on paper, 18 1/2 x 24 1/2 inches, 1934.
As naturalists like Haeckel delved into the realm of the deep sea, explorers from all over the world began conducting marine life expeditions of their own. In 1932, American naturalist William Beebe led an expedition in a bathysphere, a deep-sea vehicle, one of the earliest expeditions to directly observe the mesopelagic zone (the region between 200 to 1,000 meters below the water surface).
Though Beebe was the one in the bathysphere, Else Bostelmann, a scientific illustrator working at the New York Zoological Society, played a key role in allowing the public to envision what Beebe had seen. She referenced Beebe’s textual descriptions of marine life, crafting vivid watercolor paintings in her studio in Bermuda. Published in the National Geographic Magazine, Beebe’s book Half Mile Down, and other technical reports, Bostelmann’s artwork bridged science with artistic storytelling.
Placing the viperfish in the foreground, its jaw framing the image and extending beyond the borders, Bostelmann emphasizes the sheer size and power of this deep sea predator. Utilizing watercolor to manipulate color saturation, Bostelmann creates a high contrast between the dark sea water and the large, white teeth of the viperfish, contributing to a monstrous impression. In contrast with conventional anatomical drawings, Bostelmann incorporates artistic expression, engaging the viewer by communicating the awe-inspiring, surreal quality of deep sea wildlife.
Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Glass Jellyfish, c. 1880, Blown glass, Dimensions Variable, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Cambridge, MA.
Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka were a father-son duo who created fascinating life-like glass models of marine life during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Their Glass Jellyfish (c. 1880) portrays their ability to introduce unparalleled craftsmanship with new discoveries of the oceanic to the public. Each glass sculpture captures the delicate fluid motion of jellyfish tentacles, each striation on the glass sculptures creates a real-life organism frozen in time. This duo made it important to introduce marine life even before photographs could document these creatures under the sea without disrupting their habitat which would later serve as critical educational tools that sparked a lot of fascinations amongst the public about marine biodiversity. This hyper realistic glass model make what was known as “invisible” become visible and accessible, creating a great appreciation for the incredible wildlife there was yet to explore in the ocean.
Cleared and stained specimen of Sloane’s viperfish (Chauliodus sloani), 1990, Museum of Natural History at Tring, London.
Compared to hand illustration or sculptures, which allow space for subjective artistry, would a real physical specimen be more objective and closer to the real appearance of their deep sea subjects?
This specimen of Sloane’s viperfish was collected by the research vessel RRS Discovery in the late twentieth century. To preserve and display it, scientists used a common technique called diaphonization. First developed in 1897, diaphonization involves using enzymes to digest and remove soft tissue, then staining the remaining bone and cartilage with artificial chemicals, such as Alizarin red and Alcian blue, contributing to an exaggerated, surreal effect. While clearly showcasing bone and cartilage structures, diaphonization inevitably destroys the skin and flesh appearance of the organism in the process.
Put side by side with Else Bostelmann's watercolor painting, the specimen verifies the viperfish's fundamental anatomy, but does not provide information about the viperfish's natural appearance and habitat. Even with a real specimen, one image on its own cannot showcase the entire anatomy of the organism which it represents, nor can it provide complete information about wildlife behavior and ecological connections. Thus, to gain a deep understanding, we must explore a subject through a wide range of techniques and representations, while making analytical connections between them.
Contemporary artist, Robert Wyland, merges art with conservation through his abstract and large scale Whaling Walls mural. Most notably, his Humpback Whale (1981) in Laguna Beach, California showcases the grandness of whales. Wyland’s mural highlights the vibrant blues in contrast with the intricate brushstrokes of the ocean’s vastness. Then in the foreground, the humpback whale with photographic realistic details, create a scene that turns into an experience like being in an aquarium or ocean itself. Wyland transforms ordinary urban spaces into hubs of environmental advocacy. He depicts marine life at a large scale (quite literally), by creating an emotional connection between the viewers and the message of ocean preservation, reinforcing the urgency to maintain the oceans afloat.
Robert Wyland, Humpback Whale, 1981, Acrylic mural, 90 × 30 ft, Laguna Beach, CA
A artistic calling to ocean environmental activism.
Jose Luis de Vicente, Echoes of the Ocean, 2025, Digital Art, Dimensions Variable, Madrid, Spain
Can AI create special and unique art work, capable of spreading a message?
Label Rewritten by Ariana Zavala:
Initially, finding out that this exhibition was based off new AI technologies made me question whether or not art has evolved in a way where artists no longer contain their unique personal creativity usually seen in art. However, this piece is great representation that although these digital visuals are AI, can still produce profound message such as noise/ocean pollution affecting marine life in a vivid and unique experience.
Created by Hose Luis de Vicente, a Spanish curator and cultural researcher renowned for his approach to exploring art, technology, and society, the exhibition Echoes of the Ocean, is an immersive piece of art presented at Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Madrid. The exhibition integrates both science, technology and modern art to shed light on humanity's responsibility towards the environment, specifically the ocean. Through the twelve large screens, this immersive experience showcases images generated by artificial intelligence technologies and real sound recordings of marine species like whales from the UPC’s LAB. The vibrant hues of blue combined with the dynamic motion of AI digital visuals representing seaweed, algae, whales, and marine life bring this exhibition to life, highlighting the impact of noise pollution on aquatic species.
The echoes of the ocean.movhttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1JHhsEwo8HkT_sun5Z1S2Bxm1K12Y-xiB/view?usp=share_link
(if you want to hear with sound click on this link: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DHS22NRCYbB/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== )
For Further Reading:
Baumwell, Leah. “Behind the Research: Q&A with Artist and Marine Conservationist Guy Harvey.” Fisheries, vol. 42, no. 8, 2017, pp. 409–412. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/03632415.2017.1363642.
This fascinating peer-reviewed article offers an in-depth interview with Guy Harvey, exploring how his background in fisheries science informs his detailed marine wildlife art. It also discusses his conservation efforts, including the establishment of the Guy Harvey Research Institute.
Smith, C. R., Glover, A. G., Treude, T., Higgs, N. D., & Amon, D. J. (2015). Whale-Fall Ecosystems: Recent Insights into Ecology, Paleoecology, and Evolution. Annual Review of Marine Science, 7, 571–596. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-marine-010213-135144
This comprehensive review discusses the ecological succession and biodiversity associated with whale-fall ecosystems, including the role of species like Osedax worms, which are often depicted in artistic representations of whale falls - like in Young's Rosebud Whale Fall.
Hoyt, Erich. Creatures of the Deep: In Search of the Sea’s “Monsters” and the World They Live In. Firefly Books, 2001.
This book provides a detailed discussion of the history of deep sea exploration and deep sea marine life research, from the earliest documentations/speculations of deep sea life to modern technological innovations and discoveries, providing compelling evidence for the importance of learning about and conserving deep sea species.
Reiling, Henri. “THE BLASCHKAS’ GLASS ANIMAL MODELS: ORIGINS OF DESIGN.” Journal of Glass Studies40 (1998): 105–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24190504.
This journal provides more information about the history and the origin of the Blaskcha glass models. It dives deep into how the father and son duo became interested in marine life and inspired by Haeckel's detailed worked on new marine life discoveries.
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