Overview
Book Launch: What Did The Deep Sea Say? by Marion Coutts, in conversation with Lauren Elkin
Held in parallel with Christina Mackie’s exhibition, Material Reality, What Did The Deep Sea Say? charts similar terrain in its thinking through art, geology and the precarity of life at the edge.
The book unfolds in the aftermath of a catastrophic loss. A mother and her young son cross the Atlantic, taking refuge in a wooden house on a remote strip of land. Viewed from the shore, where land meets sea, the horizon is a line that holds their attention and draws them in. Camera in hand, she charts their progress and starts to imagine new ways of being and a new existence for her small family. What Did The Deep Sea Say? is a devastating and fierce reflection on intimacy and separation, the visible and the invisible and the fragility and strangeness of the ocean and its borders.
Coutts will read from the book, followed by a discussion with writer Lauren Elkin (Scaffolding, Art Monsters, Vocal Break).
What Did The Deep Sea Say? is published by Fern Press / VINTAGE.
BIOGRAPHIES
Marion Coutts is a writer and artist who has exhibited throughout the UK and internationally. She has held fellowships at Tate Liverpool and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, and was a Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. Her first book, The Iceberg, won the Wellcome Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book Award for Biography. She is a Reader in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Lauren Elkin is the author of several books, including Scaffolding, Art Monsters, and Flâneuse, which was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Her essays have appeared in Granta, the London Review of Books, Harper’s, The New York Times, Le Monde, and Frieze, among others, and in the past year she has translated work by Simone de Beauvoir, Lola Lafon, and Constance Debré, as well as the authoritative biography of Louise Bourgeois. Her next book, Vocal Break: On Women, Music, and Power, will be released in May 2026. She lives in southeast London.
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