Law of the Sea
Graphite & watercolour on digital pigment print in an edition of 20, image size 66 x 48 cm, paper size 76 x 58.5 cm.
“It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.” Hunter S. Thompson.
Seafarers have always been apprehensive about what they might find in their travels. Mistakes about marine life have ranged from inaccurate assumptions about the behaviour of known species to fanciful depictions of animals that ‘might’ exist and that are visualised in the illustrations on early printed maps.
By the early 17th Century knowledge had burst the bounds of the library and now seemed as large and varied as the world itself. It resided in astronomers’ telescopic observations, mariners’ reports of voyages and physicians’ studies of anatomies.
