The Aquatic Ape (Our Mercousin?),
841 x 300 mm,
Digital Print,
A new piece for ‘I Know I don’t know / But what if we’re wrong?’, an illustration exhibition at No End Contemporary art space .
The exhibition presents a collection of illustrated speculations exploring various phenomena. It features a collection of (un)/(ill) informed visual guesses, an admittance to that which we have never quite understood, bothered to or made the effort to understand, or that for which we have developed our own fictions.
My piece was inspired by ‘The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis’, a controversial theory about the origins of man and suggests that early primates spent some of their time evolving in a semi-aquatic environment, before returning to land. The theory suggests that this could explain how our ancestors’ brains developed (due to the type of food found by water) and certain aspects that only humans have and don’t share with other primates, like our partially webbed fingers. In an alternate world, I imagined some of these primates didn’t return to land and kept on evolving and became what we now know as ‘mermaids’.