Oil on our mother’s back
Octopus Container is an immersive art installation about the dying seas, installed outside the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich. The artwork was inaugurated for the Tyndall Centre’s Critical Decade for Climate Action Conference in September 2025.
With/for: Self-initiated work (2025)
Octopus Container (2025)
Not here to be liked
Steel shipping container, electronics, solar power system, 3D-printed replica of lost Lego octopus, fish tank, North Sea water, whale song, sea shanty, scientific facts, 3D-printed interpretation of Henry Moore's Mother and Child (1932), food colouring, water, water pumps, pipes, wood, paint, papier-mâché, printed materialsur text here…
The installation uses a machine perception interface to configure itself in response to those who enter it. The container’s systems mimic octopus cognition – a distributed form of intelligence that reacts immediately to external environmental changes. One pathway into the space leads through grief towards the sound of the loneliest whale ‘singing’ to a plastic octopus, the sole survivor of the acid sea and the voice of Phoebe Plummer reading sections of the IPCC AR6. The other, in which a suspended sculpture of an octopus pours black liquid onto a 3D-printed interpretation of Henry Moore’s Mother and Child (1932), currently on view at the Sainsbury Centre. The installation draws from protest vocabulary and aesthetics to present a call for collective action in museums through resistance and song.
