In June 2024, the public were invited to join artist Emma Critchley and specialist collaborators on a Walk to the Bottom of the Sea.
The event helped inform Critchley’s exhibition, Soundings, showing at John Hansard Gallery from 8 February to 3 May 2025.
Walking along the Woolston and Hamble Coastal Path in Hampshire, the group collectively walked the seven mile distance to the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench. The aim was to explore different ways we might find a connection with ‘the deep’.
Visitor comment: “What a generous day that was too – so many voices. Honestly, it’s changed the way I interpret the ocean. Thank you so much.”
While seven miles does not seem far on land, the deep-sea remains remote to most – both physically and perceptually. Critchley invited speakers to give interventions, to acts as provocations for conversation as they walked. With the imminent prospect of deep-sea mining, the sea has become the new frontier of extractivism. How we imagine, portray, and talk about the deep ocean becomes fundamental to how we govern it.
Below you can listen to the speaker provocations. Contributors include Emma Critchley, Marine ecologist Jon Copley, marine researcher Fiona Middleton, author Wyl Menmuir, and freediver Liv Philip:
75m: Deepest depth freediver Liv Philip has dived. The light is now a deep, dark, timeless blue. You are now a small creature suspended in this world. The water is directing you now. As you fall, you know down here you are small. Your ancient body knows. Listen here
1000m: Absolute limit of daylight
2292m: Deepest tag recording of a whale. Why do we fear the deep ocean? Through literature we have populated the deep-sea with terrifying monsters of the mind. Can we turn this fear into fascination? Listen here
3400m: The average depth of the ocean
5500m: The average depth of the Clarion Clipperton Zone: the area in the Pacific Ocean proposed for deep sea mining. 90% of species in the species here are currently unnamed. Listen here
8234m: The height of Everest. The compulsion to see more, to understand more, and to write or perform stories of the deep is deeply human and driven by different values, different incentives and aesthetics and love. Listen here
11000m: The Mariana Trench becomes something of an echo chamber for sounds from miles around; strange moans, low rumbles and the occasional high-pitched screech of baleen and toothed whales, earthquake rumblings, and a propeller boat at the surface 6.7 miles away. Listen here
