jason de caires taylor: underwater sculptures.

Creating environmental art inside the world’s largest gallery, Jason de Caires Taylor’s underwater sculptures literally come to life. A passionate scuba diver and artist, his oceanic installations are otherworldly, enigmatic, and astoundingly beautiful. He creates solemn and haunting human shapes, arresting in their casual acts and calm conformity. Like outcasts of Atlantis, living all of their days at the bottom of the world.

To me, the most magical part of all is that over time these works aren’t just displayed in the ocean, they literally become the ocean. They wear away, erode into liquid, and plant life spreads itself across them. Absorbed by the very medium that creates their interest, they’re both a celebration and a sacrifice to the sea.

If you’re into this, check out the world-renowned outdoor installation of Antony Gormley and Nicola Basic’s amazing Sea Organ.

Via The Post Family

james cooper.

Water is both a lucid dream and a contradictory nightmare.

Despite our evolution, it’s a place we’re no longer allowed to be. Comprised of it, our very bodies draw us toward it;  the water in our cells and the water of the world are like magnets constantly reaching out to each other. Life-sustaining and essential, we can’t live without water but despite our desire we aren’t allowed to live within in either. It beckons us but will just as easily, without thought, drown us. It promises everything yet assures us of nothing.

Viscous and prismatic, we are visually enthralled by its sights and sounds and within its heights and depths we can have an experience as close to flight as anything an unaided human will ever know. Though never far from our minds we know that this buoyancy can shift to prison without warning. Water is false freedom, and we are inevitably ether moored within it forever or expelled out. We may only visit. The moment you let yourself think only of its wonder is when you must immediately remind yourself of its treachery. Or you will die.

I’ve found photos that capture these thoughts. James Cooper’s amazing photos reflect every mood of water: beauty, deceit, abandon, hindrance, effulgence, release, life, and death. They are superb in every sense.

Via Tiny Vices

antony gormley: another place.

There’s an intrinsic, undeniable draw towards the sea. Maybe it’s the same lunar gravity that moves the tides, maybe it’s because we were all fish a billion years ago, or maybe it’s the lure of knowing that no matter what machines we strap to our backs or submerge ourselves in, it’s simply not a place where our fragile bodies will let us go for very long.

Or maybe, since we’re mostly made of water ourselves, it’s just the natural, molecular pull of little atoms reaching out to find each other again. A genetic memory too quiet for our brains to understand. What if our very bodies miss the sea? Our skins on the shore, our bones in the beach, our body pulls to return into the same water that it was born from.

In British artist and sculptor Antony Gormley’s “Another Place”, he perfectly captures the universal longing human beings feel for the ocean. Not with much crazy metaphor, but by casting his very own body in iron and replicating himself into a little army. 100 statues are moored into the sand along a 3.2 kilometre stretch of the Mersey Estuary on Crosby Beach near Liverpool, England. Each is over 6’2″ tall, weighs 1400 lbs., and was made from more than 17 different casts from Gormley’s own body. Like sentinels, they each stand 250 metres apart from each other. Some are closer to the shore and some are up to 1 kilometre out, but all are standing exactly the same and gazing into one direction: out to sea.

When the tides are fully out, each of the 100 men are completely exposed. But as the tide rolls back in, one by one they’re slowly swallowed up by the water. Like a ceremony, their yearning pulls it towards them. They each stand and wait their turn to be voluntarily enveloped.

Gormley continued to experiment with the use of multiple figures in 2006 with “Time Horizon”. A second set of figures was cast, this time placed into an olive tree grove at the Archaeological Park of Scolacium near Catanzaro, Calabria, Italy. This time they are each facing different directions and stand at different heights in the ground. “Time Horizon” doesn’t exhibit the same fluidity of “Another Place”, but a more ancient feel. The way the ground erodes and shifts amongst these statues is slow and tectonic and much greater than we can hope to see in a moment of standing there. These are movements so slow we can feel them, but will never be able to watch. “Another Place” rides the waves in a day, while “Time Horizon” carries the weight of eons.

To see more from Gormley, check out this video from his latest exhibition in London, “Blind Light”: