Sea Inside

Please note that this exhibition has now closed. It took place from 7 June to 26 October 2025.

Have you ever wondered what it feels like to live underwater, to be inside a shell, or even the belly of a whale?

Featuring experimental contemporary artworks across a range of media by artists including Shuvinai Ashoona (b.1961), Marcus Coates (b.1968), Evan Ifekoya (b.1988), Laure Prouvost (b.1978) and Hiroshi Sugimoto (b.1948), Dr Sarah Wade (University of East Anglia) and Dr Pandora Syperek (Loughborough University London) curated a unique oceanic experience that explored humanity’s interconnections, interrelationships, and immersion in oceans.

While some humans have pursued life above or under water – through seafaring, research, fishing or diving – others have and still are subjected to the horrors of forced or desperate maritime crossings. Yet the sea has often been viewed as a mysterious ‘other’, with its expansive surface and seemingly infinite depths dominating marine imagery in the history of Western art. Conversely, artworks in this exhibition explored the ways the oceans had been domesticated, reimagined on a bodily scale and brought inside to be tamed, contained or better understood.

Sea Inside turned our oceanic gaze towards the sea’s more intimate spaces – whether physical, psychological or imaginary – and dived into shared watery origins, Indigenous ways of life and the items we remove from the sea to display on land.

Thanks to the many artists in the exhibition:

Shuvinai Ashoona, Heidi Bucher, Marcus Coates, Tyler Eash, Chioma Ebinama, Gabriella Hirst, Evan Ifekoya, Sonia Levy, Kasia Molga, El Morgan, Harun Morrison, Laure Prouvost, Shimabuku, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Skye Turner.

Sea Inside was part of a six-month season of interlinked exhibitions and events exploring the question Can the Seas Survive Us?

Image top: Shuvinai Ashoona, Composition (At the Dentist), 2022. Copyright Shuvinai Ashoona, courtesy of the collection of Alexander V. Petalas.