Department of Art History
The term “sepia” usually describes a warm, brown color, but few know that this artistic usage is taken from the animal world, where Sepia refers to a genus of cuttlefish—a nod to the long history of extracting melanin fluid from cephalopods for drawing and writing. This talk uses cuttlefish ink as a vehicle for rethinking human-ocean relations in the mid nineteenth century, tracing flows between novelist Victor Hugo’s maritime drawings made in the Channel Islands to paleontological discoveries and scientific illustrations on nearby coastlines. Experiments with biotic media, the talk argues, were efforts to conceptualize the nonhuman environment of the ocean.
