giant starfish washes up in Portsmouth in this apocalyptic performance art

Five women slowly process across Portsmouth’s municipal park, covered in hessian-coloured layered fabrics. On their heads they wear what look like strange overgrown dreadlocks, making them a group of connected beings. They move towards a deflated hessian starfish shape on the floor. Circling it, they enact a ritual performance, animating the space and quietly paying homage to the five-armed symmetry of echinoderms.

This living sculpture is a performance called Between Land and Tide. It was conceived by Olana Light, a Portsmouth-based artist, in collaboration with local dancers. They will perform for the rest of this summer and into the autumn in Portsmouth.

The performers move and join hands like an obtuse pagan dance of gestures, forming unusual angles and movements. Their bodies connect and disconnect. Slowly they descend into the starfish structure and pump life into the inert form. Starfish have no muscles but use water pressure to create movements – the dancers imitate this liquid opacity in the performance.

At one point the performers look like they are moving into a textured set of sleeping bags. Then they breathe, pulse, writhe and transform the five-legged form into a giant lost sea creature, inhabiting the scorched earth of the park’s drought-yellowed surface.

There is something apocalyptic in this performance and sculptural image, reminiscent of the strange visions of science fiction master John Wyndham (author of The Day of the Triffids, 1951). He wrote about mutations and the uncanny architecture of a climate-ravaged future.

The movements of the women in the starfish are darkly mesmerising. You are occasionally aware of their lips and mouths while they writhe within the textured form of the starfish arms. The arms search the air and the ground looking for what could be the safety and solace of the ocean. This starfish is far away from the beach.

After some time, the form mutates in the performance. The human protrusions of limbs and human arms split the starfish apart. Then, the augmented performers leave the space like post-apocalyptic slugs dragging the starfish arms behind them.

The climate crisis has a communications problem. How do we tell stories that move people – not just to fear the future, but to imagine and build a better one? This article is part of Climate Storytelling, a series exploring how arts and science can join forces to spark understanding, hope and action.

Living sculptures

Lights’ living sculptures connect with the work of other women artists who create challenging land art – made directly in the natural landscape – often using their own bodies. The pioneering artist Ana Mendieta is one such example. A major retrospective of her work is currently on show at Tate Modern.

Light, however, uses a unique approach in her performance art. By immersing bodies within sculptural forms made from natural materials, she creates uncanny hybrids.
This challenges the idea that nature exists primarily to serve humans. The audience I was part of looked intrigued and amused by the performance.

Mendieta’s work also explored the relationship between women’s bodies and the landscape. In her pioneering land art practice, she used her own body in works such as Tree of Life (1976-79). In these practices of meshing human and object, living sculptural forms are produced through performance, temporarily leaving human traces in the landscape.

These traces are what anthropologist Tim Ingold calls a “taskscape” – a space formed through the marks of human labour over time. The Earth can eventually erase these taskscapes and sculptural images because of our relative impermanence. As living sculptures, Light’s performances explore this precarious entanglement between landscape and life.

Between Land and Tide will be performed until September 27 2026

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