PLYMOUTH'S PROGRESS - Plymouth University

PENINSULAARTSBased within the University’s Faculty of Arts, Peninsula Arts provides a prestigious andwide-ranging series of events that opens up the arts and the University to the people ofPlymouth, the South West and visitors to the region. The year-round public programmeincludes exhibitions, music, film, talks and performing arts.DOMINION - FEBRUARY 2011The whale is the largest animal that ever lived, yetwe know so little about it that it remains one of thegreat mysteries of the natural world. This mysteryhas attracted artists, scientists, writers, musicians andstorytellers throughout the world and throughouthistory - from the ancient civilisations to Aboriginalpeoples, from 19th-century literature - in the shape ofHerman Melville’s Moby-Dick - to 21st-century cinemasuch as Free Willy and Whale Rider.In Britain, we have moved from being a whaling nationto a whale-watching nation in just one generation:many different species of whales and dolphins swimoff our shores, especially here in Devon and Cornwall.The whale is not only a symbol of artistic and literarymystique, but an emblem of ecological threat, too. Itsvastness incorporates all these themes and more, andyet remains unknowable. As Melville wrote, ‘the livingleviathan never fairly floated itself for its portrait’.Philip Hoare March 2010Peninsula Arts welcomes 2011 with a number ofcultural activities bringing together science andthe arts in a series of events surrounding its keyexhibition, Dominion. Running in the PeninsulaArts Gallery from 22 January to 6 March 2011, theexhibition features the collaboration between theinternationally acclaimed writer Philip Hoare - winnerof the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for his book,Leviathan or, The Whale - and the renowned artistAngela Cockayne, whose work has been praised byDesmond Morris, among others. Dominion seeks toexplore the links between science and art, literatureand natural history.Dominion symposiumDuring the exhibition, Peninsula Arts in conjunctionwith the University of Plymouth Marine Institute willhold a two-day symposium (18-19 February 2011),bringing together internationally celebrated whaleexperts, writers and artists. Alongside Philip HoarePhilip Hoare andAngela Cockayne.