flare


Large scale digital drawings in response to the perceived dualities of land and sea, surface and depths, natural and human worlds as they intersect and collide in the deep ocean.


Flare (1-4), Gill Russell, 2022



















...how little we know of the life of the sea or of submarine species who are so radically other, their names, taxa, ecological niches and roles either unfamiliar or unknown and I wonder why. Phytoplankton, zooplankton, micronekton, macrobenthos, multitudinous inhabitants of unimagined places of bathymetry, gradients, seafloors, of pelagic and benthic in an inverse topography of depths: supralittoral, littoral, sublittoral, bathyal, abyssal, hadal. (Hadal, from the Greek, ‘Hades’, the underworld, the origin of ‘Hadean’, the geologic era of Earth’s beginnings.)


Stepping through the clearness of this cold water, I’m aware again of my place in the scale of things, between earth and sky. This very minor act feels like an intrusion into the ebb of life rising and falling around my ankles, eddying out beyond where I’m standing to a vast, unseen universe of almost incomprehensible beauty, of echinoderm, cnidarian and ctenophore, to an entire universe of creatures glowing and brilliant, translucent or bioluminescent, radiant, the colours of jewels, creatures so unknown to us that I see their lives as clouds of drifting ink writing lines in an ancient hieratic script we’ll never be able to read.


sundog, francisco diego, ucl




















This morning, cold seems precious, to be cherished as we cherish what we might be about to lose. I wonder, will cold become a rare and valuable commodity? What might be the price of cold? Suddenly, our indifferent summer has become a gift.





 

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