“The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. All through the long history of Earth it has been an area of unrest where waves have broken heavily against the land, where the tides have pressed forward over the continents, receded, and then returned. For no two successive days is the shoreline precisely the same”. – Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea, 1955.

Does the sea surround the land, or the land the sea? The ocean has two edges: the edge from which you step out of the world you know; and the sea of possibilities, a threshold of imagination. Inspired by the pioneering environmentalist and writer Rachel Carson, Glasgow-based, Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle, who represented Scotland at the 2022 Venice Biennale, joins Brazilian artists Letícia Ramos and Licida Vidal to screen their works and chat with Invisible Dust’s Artistic Director Alice Sharp. Uncovering the Atlantic Ocean from Scotland to Brazil weaving together poetry, decolonial ancestral knowledge, climate change and marine science. 

Atlantic Ocean species including a black seadevil fish from the Porcupine Abyssal Plain, a flower coral from Barbados and leatherback turtle hatchlings from Trinidad will be displayed as part of the event, selected by Mike G. Rutherford, Curator of Zoology & Anatomy, The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, to showcase the range of the museum’s collections. In October, the artists saw live adult leatherback turtles, the largest of all living turtles, in a sanctuary in Ubatuba, Brazil and this forms part of the art and science interdisciplinary collaboration of The Ocean’s Edge programme.

This event is part of the British Council and Instituto Guimarães Rosa UK/Brazil Season of Culture 2025–26 with the Consulate General of Brazil in Edinburgh.

Partners include Cove Park, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Scottish Association for Marine Science, Embassy of Brazil in London, Consulate General of Brazil in Edinburgh (UK), Oceanographic Institute of the University of São Paulo, Bienal das Amazônias, and Universidade Federal do Pará (Brazil).

About the Artists

Letícia Ramos (b. 1976, Santo Antônio da Patrulha, Brazil), lives and works in São Paulo and has shown her work internationally. She explores the limits of the production and exegesis of analogue images through photographic and film works, which she also develops into installations, objects, publications and performances. Her practice is directed towards the aesthetic intersections between the documentary and the fictional, occurring between natural and imaginary landscapes.

Licida Vidal (b. 1984) lives and works in Ubatuba, São Paulo, Brazil. She studied Social Sciences at the University of São Paulo (USP). Through performance, photography, video, and installations, her work explores questions of gender and nature within the context of climate emergencies. Her practice weaves together subaltern knowledge, intimate experiences, and academic research in a search for strategies of habitability and the restoration of autonomy to bodies and territories. Licida Vidal is also beneficiary of Shifting Shores / Instabilidades Costeiras, the new artistic residency program in Brazil developed by TBA21–Academy, LACO–IOUSP, and Pivô, supported by the S+T+ARTS Buen-TEK initiative of the European Union.

Alberta Whittle (b. 1980, Barbados)  Alberta Whittle lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Whittle represented Scotland at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2022) Whittle works across media and poetically navigates the complex interrelationships and in between spaces in expressions of anti-blackness, colonialism and of our bodies and nature.

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