Cas Campbell
Under the Coral Sea

Cas Campbell (b. 1995 in New Zealand) is an artist exploring evolutionary and ancient history, mythology, queer culture through sculpture. In Under the Coral Sea she metaphorises marine and terrestrial natural systems to reveal the flimsiness of social, societal, political binary systems.

Campbell draws from familiar influences like ecology and deep time - here, the megafauna of the late Carboniferous period - as well as new fonts of inspiration: Patti Smith's poetic biography of Robert Mapplethorpe, The Coral Sea, and Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Smith's Mapplethorpe and Verne's enigmatic Captain Nemo are characters who reject or are exiled from the mores of society - exiles, explorers. As Nemo declares, 'I am not what you call a civilised man! I have done away with society entirely'. In their search for utopias, or for freedom from restriction, they must withstand unimaginable pressures (social or barometric), and create armoured shells - the hull of the Nautilus or the protective shield of performative identity. The sculptures which Campbell discovers under the Coral Sea are likewise the dredged up denizens of lost utopias who, by evolution, adaptation or performance, strikingly construct their own means of survival.