Sounding the alarm of the precarity of everything at the McManus: Mella Shaw’s Sounding Line installation offers an unsettling reminder that we are killing the world. Her immense white ceramic sculptures — modelled on the tiniest of inner ear bones of whales — attach to thick red ropes through which sonar pulses run. The same sonar pulses that cause confusion to the whales, leading them to beach and die.

When you put your hand on the rope you feel the strong vibrations. Imagine them magnified in the water. Imagine the vibrations you knew all your life suddenly interrupted and overlaid with other sonic atttacks. How disorienting.

There’s a whale skull there and an explanation of how the bone china clay is made from a bottlenose whale who perished in just that manner. There’s also a film of the artist dragging a huge unfired piece (the clay is made from completely natural materials) across the beach into the ocean by one of those thick red ropes, stopping to rest a couple times. Elapsed footage shows its slow disintegration. It’s very affecting.

A visit to the McManus always means visiting old friends in the museum and in the Howff