‘Squiggle, squiggle, ooh, good…’ Tate St Ives shows how sexy the octopus can be

One of the more exotic attractions at the 1939–40 World’s Fair in New York was Salvador Dalí’s ‘Dream of Venus Pavilion’, which behind its surreal façade — an architectural marriage between Antoni Gaudí and a coral reef — catered to the public’s aquatic fantasies of spume-born goddesses and topless sirens.

Something similar is going on behind the cool modernist exterior of Tate St Ives. Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep is a bottom-trawler of an exhibition that dredges the depths of the human psyche for fishy fantasies. As the show’s catalogue points out, earth’s deepest oceans — the murky regions known, in descending order, as bathypelagic, abyssopelagic and hadal — are nine-tenths unexplored, a figure that happens to coincide with the proportion of the human psyche allocated by Freudians to the unconscious. What we don’t know, our unconscious dreams up. In the words of John Steinbeck: ‘An ocean without unnamed monsters would be like sleep without dreams.’

Human imagination being a somewhat limited faculty, our unnamed monsters tend to rest on recognisably fishy foundations: those in Turner’s ‘Sunrise with Sea Monsters’ (1845), for example, are just pumped-up versions of the gurnard in a nearby sketch. But to landlubbers’ eyes the denizens of the deep are quite fantastic enough without embellishment, and many species in Aquatopia are represented faithfully. Whales figure largely in paintings by Alfred Wallis and Henry Scott Tuke, among others, and in scrimshaws by anonymous whalers; stencils of dolphins by Steven Claydon cover the walls, making the galleries look like palatial bathrooms; life-sized sharks in mixed media (no formaldehyde) by Ashley Bickerton and Dorothy Cross hang from the ceiling; and a ‘Sturgeon’ in a glass case by Mark Dion rests on a bed of costume jewellery recalling Shakespeare’s ‘heaps of pearl, inestimable stones, unvalued jewels’.