Handmark Artist, Chantale Delrue, is a passionate environmentalist and employs humour to shine a light on our oceans in a powerful exhibition at Hobart’s Maritime Museum.
Works chosen for Reimagining the Ocean are embedded throughout the Museum as we are implored to see the ocean as a source of life, rather than conquest. Determined to raise awareness about the ocean’s bounty and also dangers, Chantale “hopes her humorous twist will encourage people to treasure what we have, and the urgent need to protect it from plastics and other pollutants.”
Chantale sounds a future warning in her watercolour, Something Fishy About these Fish, as she imagines a creature made from waste products, while the Mermaid’s Tool Bag is a light-hearted counter to the Museum’s popular, and overtly masculine, Sailor’s Tool Bag. “While mermaids are always naked, they often carry accessories such as hand mirrors, combs and pearl necklaces.” Homage is also paid to the women left behind as husbands head to sea in Waiting where a young wife gazes forlornly at the ocean. “So many men at sea… so many women waiting for the return of their menfolk.”
As the exhibition’s curator, Dr Llewellyn Negrin, writes: “Through much of European history, the ocean has been viewed primarily as an adversary to be tamed” adding, this exhibition “seeks to recast the ocean in a different light… as a sanctuary in need of care rather than as something to be conquered.”
Works by Handmark contemporary jeweller, Janine Combes, also feature in this exhibition.
Reimagining the Ocean runs at Hobart’s Maritime Museum until early December.