Alice Austen’s Sapphic Siren Song

The feminine figure who emerges from the sea, or lures others into it, is an enduring image in myths across cultures. Many people know Disney’s happily-ever-after adaptation of The Little Mermaid, but in Hans Christian Andersen’s original, she doesn’t get the prince in the end. Instead, her body dissolves into the sea and her soul joins an all-female spirit world. And long before Anderson’s tale, there were figures like selkies — elusive, beautiful creatures who slip out of their seal skins to inhabit land and occasionally have sex with humans — or the ancient Egyptian goddess Nu, who personifies the primordial waters from which all creation came, and commands the power to bring it all to a watery end. Is it any wonder that there have long been sapphic associations with the sea?

 

Though the lesbian-centric group exhibition She Sells Seashells at the Alice Austen House doesn’t directly address the mythic, one of its works, by Finnish artist Nastja Säde Rönkkö, does. Those Who Kept the Light (2022), a series of 10 short videos, explores stories of women who kept lighthouses illuminated when the men who officially bore that obligation could not or would not carry out the task. Rich images explore the craggy edges of Norway and Denmark, with stark lighthouses dotting spare landscapes — pressing viewers against the elemental reality of the sea, the mysteries it continues to hold for humans, and its long association with a feminine force that is anything but coquettish.