About

Emma Critchley Soundings

Co-presented by Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts and Brighton Festival

Soundings is a three-screen film installation with live dance. This expansive portrait of the deep sea, as seen through multiple lenses, asks how we might connect with a space most of us will never experience first-hand.

Conceived as a response to the intensifying global debates on deep-sea mining for minerals of the seabed, this compelling work is a commentary on how, the ways in which we imagine, portray and talk about the deep-sea become fundamental to how we relate to and subsequently govern this space.

From an intimate encounter between a dancer and a deep-sea creature to ancient stories about our innate connection to this space; from the first maps of abyssal plains to the voices of Pacific activists, this kaleidoscopic portrayal delves into our understanding of the deep and the nuanced debates surrounding mining the seafloor.

On certain days during the exhibition (Friday 16 & Saturday 17 May), a dancer will activate the installation by encountering and moving with the creatures on the screens.

Included in the installation is a co-written open letter: Rights of the Deep, a contribution to the growing Rights of Nature movement. This letter brings together indigenous Pacific activists, legal scholars and marine scientists to co-write an open letter about our relationship with the deep-ocean and the need to protect it.

Accompanying this event is Walk to the Bottom of the Sea, a 7-mile artist-led coastal walk, symbolising the ocean’s deepest depth, with speakers sparking conversations at key points marking different ocean zones.

Soundings is supported by John Hansard Gallery, Tate St Ives and Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts with public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England. It is presented in cooperation with John Hansard Gallery, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, Tate St Ives and Quay Arts. Soundings was also kindly supported by South East Dance.

Rights of the Deep was originally commissioned by Science Gallery at King’s College London as part of the Vital Signs season.

Soundings will also be presented at Tate St Ives, Cornwall 24 May - 21 September 2025 and Quay Arts, Isle of Wight 10 October - 19 December 2025.

About Emma Critchley

Emma Critchley is an artist who uses water as a formal material property within varied media including film, photography, sound, installation and writing. Her work explores the underwater environment as a political, philosophical and environmental space. Emma is an alumni of the Royal College of Art and her work has been shown extensively in galleries and institutions nationally and internationally. Between 2016 and 2018 she made Common Heritage, a short film funded by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation about deep-sea mining for deep seabed minerals, which became the precursor to Soundings. In collaboration with artist Lee Berwick, in 2020 Emma developed a large-scale public soundscape about underwater acoustic pollution, working with scientists across the globe, the British Antarctic Survey and the Californian Ocean Alliance. Installed in the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, London, the work launched the National Maritime Museum’s ‘Our Ocean, Our Planet season’. In 2019, Emma won the Earth Water Sky residency programme with Science Gallery Venice, where she spent a year working with the Ice Memory Project. The resulting multi-screen film installation Witness premiered in the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021. Her ongoing investigative project Soundings tours UK venues in 2025, taking audiences on a journey to the deep, through film, sound and dance, bringing to light the pressing issue of deep-sea mining during a pivotal year.