In late 2021 and early 2022, Daphne and Stephanie of FIRE Lab designed an interactive exhibition titled Join Us Underwater. The Join Us Underwater exhibition took inspiration, as well as used words and illustrations, from the Underwater Haiku project and took place at Oriel Science in Swansea city centre in April and May 2022. Stephanie met and engaged with 100s of people who visited the exhibition on weekends and bank holidays throughout the two months. People contributed words and drawings about rivers, other watery worlds, and underwater places in response to large printed and jumbled words written by collaborators of the Underwater Haiku project. The words were shared on large sheets of paper hung on Oriel Science’s walls. After the exhibition, Daphne and Stephanie scanned and extracted the drawings and words shared by visitors and used those as the core components and inspiration for a final artistic creation, Join Us Underwater Film, which is shared below and at Oriel Science throughout October and November 2022.
Join Us Underwater film presents the visitors’ sketches that were either drawn on large sheets of paper on Oriel Scienc walls or on carbonated pages. You can see those sketches entering and leaving the screen throughout the film. The imagery gives you a sense for the types of elements that were shared by visitors. In addition to the sketches on screen, words shared by Oriel Scienc visitors were the inspiration for three poetic monologues written for the three migratory fishes, European sturgeon (Acipenser sturio), European eel (Anguilla anguilla), and Twait Shad (Alosa fallax), featured in the film. The monologues are spoken by Merryn Thomas (Sturgeon), Sophia G Arispe J R (Eel), and Rochelle Bristol (Shad). Illustrations of the three migratory fish species were then created by Rosario Bautista in response to the monologues and the fishes themselves. The contributions from visitors and the monologues and illustrations are combined with a narrative (spoken by Steve Thackeray) and music sequence to complete the piece.
Can you find any drawings or words that you contributed or that resonate with you? Let us know what you think of the film and its elements in the comments below.
Thanks to everyone who has followed and contributed to this Blog and website over the last 3-4 years. We will continue to share outputs on here from the project as they emerge. Note though that our posting will be more sporadic from now on because the project has technically finished.
FIRE LAB 