Sheffield Sea Life Centre transformed a busy urban underpass into an imaginary aquarium.
The work tipped a wink to the much-loved fish tank once housed in Sheffield’s famous Hole in the Road, while pushing the idea into more absurd and uneasy territory. If rising sea levels were one possible future of global warming, then perhaps Sheffield-on-Sea was not entirely impossible — only distant, comic and alarming.
Placed beneath the cars and lorries whose emissions were part of the problem, the project used the visual language of public advertising against itself. Instead of a normal poster campaign, the subway walls became a sequence of bright, repeating marine images: whales, krill, underwater signs and aquarium-like passages.
The result was deliberately playful, but also political. The absurdity of a Sea Life Centre in an inland city became a way of thinking about climate, traffic, public space and the strange futures already being built into everyday life.
Richard Bartle