Mella Shaw’s Sounding Line — an immersive ceramic installation highlighting the impact of marine sonar on mass beaching of whales and other cetaceans — opens later this month at The McManus, Dundee.
Still from Mella Shaw’s ‘Sounding Line’ film — whale bone clay form being dragged into sea in South Uist. Image: Rowan Aitchison
Mella Shaw is an artist and an environmental activist using themes of balance, fragility and loss to raise awareness and inspire change. In Sounding Line her focus is on the overuse of marine sonar which is having a devastating effect on particularly deep-diving whale species that rely on echolocation. This sonar is used by the military and by companies searching for new gas and oil reserves.
This body of work was the artist’s response to a devastating mass beaching of nearly a hundred dead whales across the Hebrides and West Coast of Scotland and Ireland in 2018 – that was largely unreported at the time.
Taking its name from the sounding line, a length of rope with a weight used to measure the depth of water, Sounding Line is an immersive ceramic installation made up of large-scale sculptural forms inspired by whales’ tiny inner-ear bones. They are made from a unique clay body using whale bone ash — the same way cow bones have been used for centuries to make bone china. With permission from NatureScot, Mella used the remains of a Northern bottlenose whale beached on the West Coast of Scotland.
Top: Found minke Whale Skull, South Uist, © Mella Shaw. Bottom: Mella Shaw with old whale bones on South Uist. Image: David Evans
In the installation, Mella wraps her sculptures in red marine rope that resonate with sonar pulse. Encouraged to touch the ropes, visitors will feel vibrations, reflecting how marine life experience sonar underwater.
The installation is accompanied by a short film documenting a return journey taking one of the unfired sculptural forms back into the sea in South Uist, Outer Hebrides, where it slowly dissolved in the sea water.
Dundee was Britain’s leading whaling port in the second half of the nineteenth century, when whales were primarily hunted for whale oil and baleen. Whale oil was burned in lamps and could be turned into candles and soap amongst other products. Baleen, a strong yet flexible material, was used extensively in fashion and homewares. As alternative materials became available, falling demand lead to the decline of the British whaling industry. In Dundee, as whale oil was a useful lubricant for the spinning process of jute, the whaling boom continued into the early twentieth century. The industry finally shut down before the start of the First World War, with whale populations devastated by heavy fishing. Dundee’s whaling past is not only reflected in the collection at The McManus (a nationally significant whaling collection, including the famous Tay Whale), but in the City around it, from street names like East Whale Street and Candle Lane to public art, including Alistair Smart’s Whale’s Teeth on Polepark Road or Lee Simmons’ Tay Whale on the Waterfront.
‘Sounding Line’ at the British Ceramics Biennial. Image: Jenny Harper
Sounding Line won the prestigious Award 2023 prize at the British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent which is the highest award for ceramics in the UK.
The artist adds:
“There’s a long history of artists using the imagery of beached whales as a symbol for impending disaster for example in 17th-century Dutch etchings. A whale on land is seen as a reversal of natural order and therefore they are seen as harbingers of doom. Thinking about this current point in climate crisis, a beached whale is a potent image. These majestic creatures have been ejected from their natural habitat due to human activity alone. This work is about the effect of sonar pollution on whales but it is also about the bigger issue of humans’ detrimental impact on every single ecosystem on the planet.”
*
‘Mella Shaw: Sounding Line’ runs from 24 May 2025 – 18 January 2026 at The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery and Museum, Albert Square, Meadowside, Dundee, DD1 1DA. Entry is free. Find further information here.