The stereotype of Elly Vadseth as a working artist is not entirely accurate. She doesn’t spend her days setting up canvases by the window in a peaceful studio in Trondheim or Oslo. She spends them on small boats, in underwater video archives, with anthropologists and deep-sea archaeologists, and sometimes in a costume designed to resemble a creature that hardly anyone has ever seen. Even by the standards of contemporary art, what the Tufts SMFA graduate brought back from her year-long immersion with a group of deep-sea researchers in Norway is unique.
Visualizing the Deep Sea in the Age of Climate Change, the project she is involved in, is precisely the kind of partnership that appears neat on paper but is quite different in reality. In addition to a few other artists, Vadseth collaborates with a media scholar, a film scholar, an anthropologist, and an art historian. The group is attempting to comprehend how the latest generation of robots, sensors, and submersibles is changing our perception of a location that people hardly ever visit. Studying this ecosystem from the outside is peculiar, and creating art about it is even more peculiar.
Observing her work gives me the impression that she is more interested in softening the deep sea than trying to explain it. Make it seem less alien. Her use of words like “empathy,” “wonder,” and “care” is genuine, but it clashes with the harsh realities of deep-sea mining and the extraction interests that surround those depths. She is aware of that. It feels appropriate that her installations allude to the tension without resolving it. There is no neat conclusion to the moral argument about the ocean floor.
One of the project’s most memorable events took place in the Trondheim fjord last autumn. The entire research team was choreographed into the water by Vadseth, wearing costumes that were loosely inspired by deep-sea creatures and processes. Using the same underwater gear that is typically aimed at marine life, half of the group performed while the other half recorded them. That kind of lens rotation has a subtly subversive effect. The specimens are the scientists. The technology designed to catalog something else catalogs their clumsy, human movements.
It’s difficult to ignore how much of Vadseth’s work takes place on the periphery. Norway’s Arctic tip. An old Berlevåg king crab factory. She and her partner Boris Kourtoukov created an augmented reality virtual installation on an island in the inner Oslo Fjord. She seems to be more interested in what occurs at the boundaries between human worlds and those we hardly touch than in the deep sea. She has visited three coastal communities as part of her Ph.D. fieldwork, all of which are dealing with fish populations that are changing, dwindling, or, in certain situations, silently exploding.
The majority of the exploders are ctenophores and jellyfish, which are tiny, gelatinous creatures that glide through the water with rows of tiny cilia and glow like something from a half-remembered dream. Vadseth speaks of them with the kind of love that most people save for their pets. Beneath that affection is an argument. The reasoning seems to be that if you can love a ctenophore, you might be more inclined to consider what we lose—and what we fail to notice—deep down.
On March 6, she will discuss all of this at a Tufts Art and Society event organized by the SMFA and the Office of the Vice Provost for Research. Elaine Short of the School of Engineering and Mary Ellen Strom of SMFA co-chair the panel, which speaks to the current state of this type of work. Not within a single department. Not in a single medium. In the dark, somewhere in the middle, in the water, waiting for someone with the patience to look.
