1. I Thought the Shell Remembered the Sea

My connection to the work begins before its theoretical framework, with a childhood experience shared by many people: holding a shell to your ear and thinking that the sound inside it was the sea.

As a child this idea felt strangely convincing, and the sounds did faintly resemble the waves and wind of the sea. A shell comes from a large body of water; after being removed from it, something apparently remains inside: it becomes a container for distance and memory. An ocean can be carried home from the beach.

In reality though the shell does not remember the sea. Its hard, curved cavity (mainly consisting of calcium carbonate) simply modifies sounds that are already present around the listener. Different shapes and sizes emphasize and suppress different frequencies, turning ambient noise into the characteristic rushing sound associated with waves. A shell is therefore not a recording device but a resonator: it shapes the sonic environment around it,¹ much like the architecture of our own ear shapes the sounds we hear.

In a way this scientific explanation is more interesting than the childhood myth it replaces. The shell seems to contain something that is actually being produced through a relationship between object, surrounding environment and listening body.

Nona Inescu's installation Echo makes this anatomical and symbolic relationship explicit: the work connects earbuds with snail shells and draws attention to the cochlea, the spiral cavity of the inner ear whose name derives from the Latin for snail.² Inescu's shells become resonating chambers and private auditory spaces. My work She;ll Oracle shares this interest in close listening, but shifts the gesture towards divination and ecology: the listener approaches not only to hear, but to ask: Perhaps the important issue was never whether the sea was literally present in the shell. Perhaps it was our willingness to listen as though it were.

2. The Oracle and the Temptation to Know

Divination is often reduced to an attempt to predict the future; however, historically, its function has been more complex. In her research on oracle consultation in ancient Greece, Esther Eidinow approaches divination not simply as an irrational belief, but as a means of responding to uncertainty. The questions people asked oracles concerned ordinary but uncontrollable aspects of life, such as marriage, travel, work, illness and personal relationships. Eidinow describes oracle consultation as a strategy through which individuals and communities could express and manage their perceptions of future risk.³ The oracle did not necessarily remove uncertainty, but rather gave it a structure through which it could be approached.

This also points towards the more spiritual dimension of divination. An oracle assumes that events which appear accidental or ambiguous may nevertheless contain meaning. A falling object, an unusual dream, the movement of an animal, a card drawn from a pack or the position of a shell can become a sign when placed within an interpretive framework. In many religious traditions, this is not considered random fortune-telling, but rather a moment when communication becomes possible between humans and gods, spirits, or ancestors. In ancient Greek divination, for instance, the encounter between the human and the divine was central to the practice. However, uncertainty remained, as the recipient still had to determine how to understand a divine sign.

Shells have entered these systems in a variety of culturally distinct ways. Cowrie shells are especially notable as their meanings have shifted between economic, bodily, and spiritual domains. They circulated widely as objects of exchange and adornment, while simultaneously acquiring ritual significance. A Ptolemaic-period cowrie held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for instance, was found in a burial site. The museum notes that cowries were widely valued as amulets, their form being associated with both the vulva — and therefore fertility — and an eye capable of protecting against the evil eye.⁴ Thus, the same small object could operate as an ornament, a valuable material, a bodily symbol, and a means of providing supernatural protection.

In West African traditions, cowrie divination developed into much more specific systems of knowledge. William Bascom’s classic study Sixteen Cowries documents ẹ̀rìndínlógún, a Yoruba divination practice in which sixteen cowries are cast and their configurations interpreted through an established corpus of signs and narratives. Bascom also traced related practices into the African diaspora.⁵ Rather than shells possessing one universal symbolic meaning, their significance emerges through particular religious systems, ritual training and relationships with divinities. Abigail Joy Moffett and Simon Hall similarly show that cowries in southern Africa accumulated different meanings as they moved between trade, adornment, ancestry, healing and divination.⁶

This specificity is important because the contemporary internet produces a very different version of “shell divination”. A website that formed part of my initial, deliberately informal research was TarotJA, whose page Wahrsagerei durch Muscheln und ihre Interpretationen presents a dramatically simplified shell oracle. Ten shells are rubbed between the hands so that they can absorb the user’s “energies”, a question about love, luck or spiritual wellbeing is held in mind, and the shells are thrown towards a circle drawn on paper. The number landing within the circle determines the reading. One shell warns about spending; two can indicate conflict in a relationship; nine apparently signal heightened creativity and potentially advantageous business projects.⁷

As ethnography, such a website is unreliable. Its references to “Africa, Brazil and Cuba” collapse radically different religions and histories into a generalized mystical origin story. Yet as contemporary internet folklore, it is fascinating. Traditions that once depended on ritual specialists, initiation, oral knowledge or communal religious contexts are reformatted into an instantly accessible webpage explanation. The supernatural system becomes mixed with the language of lifestyle advice, relationships, finances and wellness. The result occupies an unstable territory somewhere between spirituality, entertainment, self-help and belief.

Another 2010 viral moment of my childhood was the “Magische Miesmuschel”,⁸ an app that acted as a virtual seashell divination: the visitor thinks about a problem and clicks on a digital shell to receive a yes, no or maybe. The old relationship between chance and interpretation survives, but the physical casting of objects has disappeared entirely in this instance. Instead, software generates an event that the user is invited to interpret as meaningful.

The term 'conchomancy' has also been adopted by contemporary occult culture as a broad name for divination with shells. Modern guides describe various practices, such as casting shells and interpreting their orientation, selecting a shell from a bag, or simply listening intuitively to what a shell 'whispers'. One recent practitioner describes conchomancy as a 'dialogue between the seeker and the sea', assigning individual shells associations with love, journeys, protection, and emotional transformation.⁹ While these claims should not be confused with historically documented traditions, they demonstrate the enduring capacity of shells to invite spiritual projection. Its origin in the sea, its enclosed cavity, its resemblance to ears, eyes, and sexual anatomy, and the fact that it is the persistent remainder of a once-living organism all make it an object to which ideas of memory, communication, and hidden knowledge can easily be attributed.

3. The Shell as a Body After a Body

A seashell is easy to encounter as a beautiful object: something decorative, collectible or simply found on a beach. Yet before becoming an object, it was part of a living body. Molluscan shells are formed through biomineralisation, a process through which an animal gradually produces a structure largely composed of calcium carbonate. The shell grows with the mollusc, protecting its soft body while also forming the boundary through which it encounters its environment.¹⁰ It is therefore not quite accurate to describe a shell as the dead animal itself, but neither is it simply an external stone. It is a body-produced mineral structure that can outlast the organism that formed it, much like our human bones.

Yet its existence does not end with the death of the mollusc. Once empty, the shell can become habitat for another organism, break down into sediment, dissolve back into marine chemical cycles, or enter human systems of collecting, display and exchange. In this way, the shell continues to move between biological, ecological and cultural contexts long after the body that produced it has disappeared.

This is also why the seemingly harmless act of collecting empty shells is more complicated than it first appears. Shells left along coastlines continue to perform ecological functions. They can provide shelter and surfaces for other organisms, contribute material to nests, participate in calcium-carbonate cycles and become incorporated into beach sediments. A long-term study by Michał Kowalewski, Rosa Domènech and Jordi Martinell compared shell abundance on a Mediterranean beach across a thirty-year period and found that shell numbers decreased substantially as tourism increased. The authors identified recreational shell removal as one likely contributor and point to possible consequences for organisms that depend on discarded shells, sediment stability and the recycling of calcium carbonate.¹¹

This does not mean that taking a single shell from any beach is automatically an environmental catastrophe. Species, ecosystems, quantities and local regulations differ. What it does complicate is the common assumption that an empty shell has become nothing: an abandoned object available for human collection simply because its original animal is gone. The shell is empty from one perspective, but it can remain materially active within another ecological system.

The shells I eventually came to work with were already far removed from that original environment. Rather than being newly collected from beaches, they came from existing private collections whose previous owners had died. Their history therefore contains several forms of absence. However I am aware that working with inherited or second-hand shells does not erase the question of extraction. I cannot know exactly when, where or under what circumstances these particular shells were originally collected. Their age does not make that history disappear. Reusing them does, however, avoid creating a new demand for shells to be removed from marine environments. The distinction is important: the material is not automatically sustainable simply because it is “natural”. Its reuse becomes meaningful because the material is already here, already extracted and already circulating.

This question of material circulation also appears in other contemporary artistic practices involving shells. In Hard Times – Soft Sounds, Moritz Simon Geist and Jonas Engelhardt work with around twenty found, gifted and second-hand seashells rather than newly sourced ones. Motors slowly rotate the shells, which are partially filled with water. This movement creates fragile sounds due to the movement of air bubbles. Each shell's form, volume and material differs, making them individual acoustic instruments. The artists describe the work in terms of ecology, technology, tourism and extraction. This means the origin and material individuality of the shells are part of the logic of the installation rather than them being interchangeable objects.¹²

Thinking about shells in this way shifts attention away from what they merely represent and towards what they already are: structures made by living bodies that continue to accumulate meanings, uses and relationships long after those bodies have disappeared.

4. The Sea is Female! Hydrofeminism Through the Shell

Water has long been associated with the Moon, femininity, fertility, intuition, and change. It flows rather than remaining fixed, taking the shape of its container and continuously crossing boundaries. Throughout mythology, religion and philosophy, the sea is often imagined as maternal, mysterious, seductive or unpredictable. However, these associations also reproduce the familiar division whereby femininity is linked to fluidity, emotion, the body and nature, while masculinity is associated with solidity, rationality and control.

Feminist thinkers have both utilised and questioned the relationship between femininity and water. In Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, Luce Irigaray uses water and fluidity to challenge philosophical traditions based on stability, mastery and the concept of a self-contained subject.¹³ Her work is an important precursor to Astrida Neimanis's later development of hydrofeminism. In her 2012 essay, 'Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water', Neimanis moves beyond the symbolic equation of women with water.¹⁴ Rather than asking whether water is feminine, hydrofeminism asks what happens when we understand all bodies through their material relationship to water. Water continually passes between humans, animals, plants, oceans, rivers and atmospheres. While bodies may have boundaries, they are never completely closed; the water we drink, breathe, absorb and release has existed elsewhere before us and will continue into other bodies after us.

Describing ourselves as bodies of water therefore means more than simply acknowledging that the human body contains water. It means understanding the body as relational and porous — continuously connected to other bodies and environments through material exchange. Hydrofeminism thus shifts away from the old association of

woman → nature → water

and towards a more relational understanding of

body ↔ water ↔ other bodies ↔ environments.

In this context, shells can make these ideas metaphorically and materially visible: A mollusc does not produce its shell independently from the sea around it; the shell is formed through an ongoing exchange between the organism’s biological processes and the chemical conditions of the surrounding water. It is therefore both part of a body and a boundary between that body and its environment. At the same time, this boundary is not completely closed: the material conditions of the water participate in what the shell can become. In this sense, the shell can be understood not simply as an object from the sea, but as a material record of the relationship between body and environment.

This becomes particularly clear as the chemistry of seawater changes. Since increasing amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide are absorbed by the ocean, seawater becomes more acidic and the availability of carbonate ions used by many marine organisms to construct calcium-carbonate shells is reduced. Responses vary between species, but studies have documented reduced calcification, altered growth and weakened shell structures in a range of molluscs.¹⁵ A change in the surrounding water can therefore become a physical change in the body of the mollusc itself.

Hydrofeminism therefore offers a way of understanding the shell as part of a network of material relations. The shell is not an isolated object and the ocean is not an external background. Body, water and material continually shape one another. What appears to be a hard and stable boundary is, in fact, the result of an ongoing relationship between an organism and its environment.

Melody Jue’s work Wild Blue Media extends this idea by asking what happens when seawater itself is understood as a medium rather than merely as something represented by media.¹⁶ For Jue, the material conditions of seawater shape how information can be sensed, transmitted and stored. Applied to the shell, this shifts attention away from seeing it as a symbolic image of the ocean. The shell is instead a product of the ocean as a material medium: its form, chemistry and acoustic qualities emerge from conditions that are inseparable from the watery environment in which it was produced.

5. Listening to the Ocean: Sound, Memory and Environmental Archives

Melody Jue’s Wild Blue Media proposes that seawater should not only be understood as something represented by media, but as a medium in itself.¹⁷ For Jue, the material conditions of seawater shape how information can be sensed, transmitted and stored. This shifts attention away from seeing the ocean simply as a landscape or symbolic image and instead considers it as an environment that actively influences the forms of communication taking place within it.

Sound offers a particularly direct example of this. Since light diminishes rapidly underwater, sound plays an important role in marine communication, navigation and perception. In Acoustic Ocean, Ursula Biemann explores this sonic environment through the work of a Sámi biologist-diver using hydrophones and recording instruments in the waters around the Lofoten Islands. Rather than positioning the human observer outside the ecosystem, Biemann places the human body, technology, marine organisms and seawater within the same field of listening.¹⁸ The recording instruments extend human perception into an acoustic environment that would otherwise remain largely inaccessible to us.

The shell can also be understood through Jue’s idea of the ocean as a medium. Its form, chemistry and acoustic qualities emerge from conditions inseparable from the seawater in which it was produced. In this sense, the shell is not simply an object that represents the ocean; it is a material product of the ocean and of the exchanges taking place between an organism and its environment.

Sound, however, is not the only way in which the marine environment leaves traces. A shell itself can function as an environmental archive. During growth, molluscs incorporate physical and chemical information from their surroundings into successive layers of shell material. Through sclerochronology, researchers analyse growth increments and chemical signatures in shells to reconstruct aspects of past environmental conditions.¹⁹ The environment is therefore not only something surrounding the animal while it lives; traces of those conditions become materially embedded within the structure it produces.

This introduces an interesting reversal in relation to divination. While an oracle promises knowledge of what has not yet happened, a shell can contain material evidence of what has already happened. In this sense, the shell can be imagined simultaneously as an oracle of the future and a scientifically readable archive of the past.