A fin rising on a wide blank sea is a single channel video which re-tells the historical story of a of a 70ft long, 40 tonne blue whale, that washed ashore in Boscombe (Dorset) in 1897. The story is re-told through the lens of science fiction writer Ursula K le Guin's 1988 short essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction and documents the process of rendering a 3D replica fragment of the whale's jawbone. Taking a investigative, yet speculative tone, the video seeks to counteract dominant ocean narratives and whale-based mythologies, instead proposing that traces of more-than-human histories can enable us to reconsider ecological assemblages.

Commissioned by BEAF 2021