While this may come as no surprise to those acquainted with her 1990s Grunge era work, which, in Australia, was understood as part of the phenomenon of abject art, I am interested in tracing the impact of an expressly surrealist wetness across her oeuvre. The Australian artist Mikala Dwyer has described her work variously as ‘osmotic’, ‘leaky’, ‘fluid’, and ‘porridge-y’. The ocean is offered up as a catalyst for thinking about the politics of transformation and new ways to reconsider the complex interconnections between culture, history, nature and aesthetics. This session will explore the impact of the surrealist imagination in both modern and contemporary art. Added to this are the ways in which surrealist imaginings might be used to subvert familiar associations between the sea and the unconscious, thus providing avenues for exploring new watery materialities. Recently, an appreciation of surrealism’s political opposition to a blind faith in the idea of progress has attracted attention from scholars wishing to reconsider the problematic relationship between discourses around technology, colonisation and the crisis in ecology. Attracted to its rich Freudian associations and enthralled with the idea of the ocean as a symbol of transformative potential, the surrealists claimed the ocean as a supreme space in which radical opposites could coexist. Represented as sublime, chaotic, mysterious or filled with magical creatures, the surrealists drew on this rich tradition. The ocean has long been a source of inspiration for artists and poets, including as a metaphor for journeying into the unknown.
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