A series of works in progress, generated at the National Oceanography Centre, where I am currently Leverhulme Artist in Residence, exhibited as part of a group show on Mapping at Howard Gardens Gallery, University of Wales Institute.

Each marks an attempt to engage with processes of representing the undersea world while providing a counterpoint to the virtual and optical emphasis of scientific methods. Seeking ways of 'knowing', centred upon the imagination, desire, the body and touch, capable of resisting the separation of subject and object demanded by the use of observation as a way of encountering the world.

Gallery Talk - Dr Tim Le Bas (NOCS) and Rona Lee discuss their current project Truthing Gap exploring methods of visualising and modelling the emergent landscape of the deep sea bed. Chaired by Dr Clive Cazeaux

Truthing Gap is a project, which involves research into undersea environments and related human activity, that I have been working on for a number of years and which runs in parallel with the Submersion Series. It is driven by an interest in the ways in which the sub maritime might be thought of as of extra geographic and existing 'outside' of culture.

I am currently Artist in Residence (funded by the Leverhulme Trust) at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, one of the world's top five oceanographic research institutions, working with sonar geophysicist Dr Tim Le Bas exploring methods of seabed mapping and undersea survey. The project will explore the play of myth, imagination and objectivity, involved in envisaging environments that cannot be directly experienced, probing issues of knowledge production, perception and the nature of the scientific gaze.

Truthing Gap originates from an earlier cycle of works investigating different coastal locations and the ways in which they might be said to constitute a border zone, between for example, civic and natural. Following the encircling of a shadow 2001 I began to speculate about the idea of 'passing over the edge' and entering not only another element but also a space which might be thought of as culturally and psychologically 'other'. Around the same time the chance discovery of a historical bathymetric (undersea) map of the world (see image) in which the seabed was revealed as a region with its own distinctive contours and plains, left me fascinated by the looking glass world into which it provided a glimpse.

Currently the deep seabed constitutes the largest yet least known environment on the planet, a space whose histories are geological rather than social, one which is never the less subject to rapidly accelerating economic, political and ecological pressures. Problems of depth and visibility necessitate that undersea surveys be made using sonar, rather than optically, a circumstance which might be said to place the deep ocean at one remove from the post enlightenment drive to render the world as observable phenomena. The work of Dr Le Bas and his colleagues seeks to minimize the challenges posed by such locations to attempts to map them, painstakingly cleaning and re-modelling raw data to achieve recognisable forms. For me this process and the visual practices to which it give rise are fascinating. Incidents such as the recent use, by Russian broadcasters, of footage from the film Titanic, within reports of undersea territorial claims (symbolized by the planting of a flag on the seabed 14,000 feet beneath the North Pole), suggest a collapsing of real and imaginary which make this dialogue particularly timely.Technically the term 'truthing gap' refers to the necessity to verify sonar data with other findings, here it refers to the question of what we 'see' when looking at undersea environments and how our perceptions are formed.

The work we propose to do has a number of strands, including the fabrication of physical, as opposed to virtual, models in different materials; the production of annotated maps which contextualise the environments being surveyed economically, politically and culturally and the staging of a programme of readings, screenings and lunchtime seminars, at NOCS designed to prompt reflection on the work being undertaken, from a cultural and imaginative as well scientific perspective.

The last two images on this page show samples of bathymetric maps created by Dr Le Bas

Calenture  - a heat induced fever; in sailors it can produce a form of delusion whereby the sea is thought to be land, causing them to jump overboard in a kind of ecstatic delirium.

This work was made during Land Use Poetics, an intensive four day cross-disciplinary workshop exploring land use, involving ten international artists and researchers.

Through different forms of spatial engagement – bus tours, walks, gathering specimens, study visits and discussions – the traces and dislocated meanings of the landscape between Malmö and Lund, Sweden, a terrain upon which historically agriculture, shipping, and industry, have left an indelible imprint, along with contemporary activities related to, for example, leisure and waste disposal, was explored, scrutinized and mapped out,

The ‘findings’ arrived at were exhibited in The Museum of Sketches, Lund, Sweden March 22-30

My starting point was the proposition that I should swim ‘blind’ in a number of local swimming pools. The sound that can be heard on the video records the moment when, having walked with my eyes closed to the end of the diving board at Pilangsbadet swimming pool, I jumped ‘blind’ in to the water.

The work might be understood in relation to ideas of the sublime. By closing my eyes the ordering capacities of vision are suspended, occasioning a new sensory awareness of the capacity of water to trouble any attempt to fix or map its surface.