Michaela Gleave
Oceanic Feeling
2021
Vinyl mirror, text, Giclée print, florescent light in glass window box
247 x 105 x 52 cm
Photographs: 1-2 Scott Igoe, 3-4 Penny Walker-Keefe
It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, Between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart. Haruki Murakami
Oceanic Feeling reflects on humanity's ever-present search for meaning in the cosmos, a relationship with the night sky that has shaped the history of our species from its very beginnings. The phrase 'oceanic feeling', coined by Romain Rolland in a letter to Sigmund Freud, describes the sensation of eternity, a “feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole”, which Rolland considered the basis of all religious or transcendental experience. In a post-God world, where scientific knowledge has abstracted reality down to a mathematical construct, Oceanic Feeling responds to our ultimately human perspective of the cosmos. It considers the infinite depths of the universe, its mirror in consciousness, and the thin veneer of reality that exists between the two.
This work was presented as part of the exhibition Cosmic Analogues, curated by Penny Walker-Keefe, at Dirty Dozen in the Campbell Arcade, Melbourne