The nave of Winchester Cathedral in Hampshire is, until February 26 2025, home to three monumental ambassadors from the sea, sculpted by artist Tessa Campbell Fraser.
In Campbell Fraser’s immersive art installation, three sculpted sperm whales (the largest of the toothed whales), hang from the cathedral ceiling. Toothed whales have teeth instead of the keratinous baleen that blue whales and others use to feed on tiny animals, such as krill. Sperm whales, which feed mainly on squid, are the largest predators alive today.
Their ecology is strange, but impressive. They are socially sophisticated, massive-brained, far-wandering, deep-diving and loud. Sperm whale clicks are the loudest biologically produced sound ever recorded.
Whales use these strange vocalisations to echolocate as they hunt for prey and to communicate to each other. In this installation, Campbell Fraser has creatively employed sperm whale clicks to vibrate paint on the banners that hang alongside the whales in the cathedral, serving as a visual representation of sperm whale “codas”. These repetitive patterns of clicks, lasting a few seconds, have intrigued researchers since they were first recorded off North Carolina, US, in the 1950s.
We now know that groups of sperm whales are organised into “vocal clans” based on unique coda repertoires. These whale call signatures have probably been learned culturally, but scientists are yet to understand what they mean.
While carrying out her research, Campbell Fraser referenced a multidisciplinary research collaboration that’s seeking to translate whale calls using artificial intelligence. Already, that project has discovered that sperm whale codas are far more complex than previously thought.
The three whale sculptures (which are between three and five metres long) are made, in part, from “ghost gear” – this is abandoned, lost, and discarded fishing gear, collected at sea by British charity Ghost Fishing UK. Floating ghost gear, which includes fishing nets, can kill or entangle marine life such as whales.
At the opening of the exhibition, Campbell Fraser recounted reports of stranded sperm whales whose stomachs were filled with plastic debris. One sperm whale that was found dead in Pas-de-Calais, France, had 25kg of debris, including nets and rope, in its stomach.
Despite this lethal backstory, Campbell Fraser’s method of construction gives the whales an ephemerality and lightness. This seems at odds with their mass in real life, for sperm whales can weigh 45 tonnes, but it is apt considering they are nearly weightless in water. This has allowed baleen whales to evolve such massive bodies. Blue whales are the largest animals to have ever lived, despite feeding almost exclusively on tiny krill.
Using netting in these sculptures represents, on one level, the increasing effects of humans on the ocean and whales. On another level, it hints at the long entanglement between human history and whales. Our spiritual, cultural and intellectual links with whales are represented through rich intersections of art and science.
One famous literary example is the 1851 novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville, which artfully weaved descriptions of whale biology with the human story of pre-industrial whaling. This theme is also explored by our colleague Philip Hoare in his book Leviathan (2009).
Unfortunately, people have negative effects on the oceans. The consequences of pollution, overfishing and climate change are widespread and increasing. Even in the furthest corners of the sea, whales may encounter humans or be affected by our influence, through climate change, noise and plastic pollution.
Our research has shown how whale foraging areas in the remote western Antarctic peninsula overlap with an increasing fishery for Antarctic krill which now requires urgent and careful management to ensure its sustainability for people and whales.
Through an unprecedented compilation of over 1,000 tracks from eight whale species globally, we have produced a world-first map of “whale superhighways” – the blue corridors whales use as they migrate across oceans. This map also highlights how these extensive migrations expose whales to a mosaic of threats at various scales. As a result, protecting whales requires coordinated effort at local and global scales.
Of course, scale is a key consideration in the design of cathedrals. Winchester is a particularly fine example – at 170m, it is the longest medieval cathedral in the world.
On February 6, four composer-performers from the University of Southampton’s department of music will perform a specially commissioned, site-specific piece called Echolocations. The music will approach this intersection of art and scientific research from another angle, in part by responding to the expansive acoustics of the cathedral.
Vocalist Liz Gre and pianist Ben Oliver, with live electronics performed by Pablo Galaz and Drew Crawford, will work with this acoustic to evoke the vast aquatic distances across which whales communicate. And inspired by the ghost netting in Campbell Fraser’s sculptures, the music will address the threat that ongoing human activities are having on marine ecosystems via noise pollution.
We are polluting the oceans with plastic and sonic garbage. It sometimes seems we will be incapable of action until whale song ends up a digitally rendered collective memory.
But this performance inspires the same qualities of imagination that enable us to conceive of building the gothic medieval wonder of the cathedral’s nave, conquer oceans to build global trade networks, mine the ocean floor and use machine learning to understand whale song. This level of imagination will be vital in creating a new set of sustainable relations with the rest of the planet.
