Jellyfish - video, 2002, Dorothy Cross
Nipped up to Liverpool briefly over the weekend and saw the Shackleton photograph exhibtion at the Maritime Museum and Underwater at the Bluecoat Gallery. Both were exhibitions primarily about photographing big, huge expanses of… well, nothingness. I was particularly taken with Dorothy Cross’ video of herself floating in a pool with thousands of jellyfish. Not only was the water boundless and limitless, but the slowly revolving mass of jellyfish also seemed a teeming mass without number, definition or end. It was only Cross herself, suspended just below the surface, a dreaming, half-alive figure, that gave the video focus and scale. Likewise with Frank Hurley’s photographs of the Endurance stuck out in the endless Antarctic nothingness, the details of ice and sky were almost impossible to take in without the tiny and frail human figures crouched, exhausted, near-dead, in the foreground.
I was reminded of satellite and aerial photographs of geological formations – the way the colour and pattern makes it almost impossible to figure out the scale of the image. Is it a patch of lichen? A volcanic caldera? Maybe it’s only by focusing on the human element that we can successfully process images of the great expanses of the world – the endless oceans, filled with life; the endless unexplored wilderness, filled with the unknown.
Anyway, great stuff.
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