Megan Dunn’s otherworldly exhibition The Mermaid Chronicles explores the surprising ways in which our lives are deepened by the myth of the mermaid, and to find out what they really mean.
How far would you go to prove a point?
I’ve donned a mermaid tail and gone all the way to make my current exhibition The Mermaid Chronicles, on show at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery in Wellington.
In 2018, I stood on an escalator with Merman Jax as we passed the poster for Jurassic World with its steely logo of a T-Rex, its jaws open as though it could take a bite out of you.
“Have you seen it yet?” I asked.
“No. I always thought dinosaurs were like mermaids for men,” he said.
I laughed. “That’s going in my book.”
We were at The Grove, a shopping centre in Los Angeles, and I was near the end of my big research trip to America to meet real mermaids — and mermen like Jack Laflin who performs as Merman Jax, one of the highest-profile mermen in the industry. In a commercial for the American fast-food chain Jack-in-the-box, Merman Jax lies on a Lilo in a glowing swimming pool lit up, late at night.
“Why is there a merman in the pool?” asks the chain’s mascot, a guy in a suit, wearing a white round clown head, with a giant cap perched on top, like an upside-down ice cream cone. In the background, Merman Jax gives his blue silicone tail a sexy, surly flick.
It’s only a few seconds of footage — but it’s the perfect combo of the mythic and the modern. And it captures the absolute surrealism of being a merman in LA. “Being a professional merman is very different from being a professional mermaid, it is obviously just so much more widely accepted for a girl. Some people still don’t know what to call a merman; are you a man-maid, are you a male mermaid?”
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Advertise with NZME.My exhibition includes an excerpt from an Odd Jobs episode featuring Merman Jax, first aired on Crypt TV. The son of Filipino abalone divers on his mother’s side, and Irish whalers on his father’s side, Jack is a competitive swimmer who grew up with the ocean in his blood. He came to LA originally intending to act, but after he kept getting cast as either a gangster-thug or a sexy dancer in a nightclub, he realised he just didn’t love it enough.
Now he runs his own boutique events company, Dark Tide. “I partly got into this industry because I didn’t see the type of performers I would hire [represented]. Lots of people of colour don’t think they can be mermaids, professionally or recreationally. We want to change the dialogue but until people rise up it’s this vicious circle.”
The recent internet furore over Disney casting the African American actress Halle Bailey as their next Ariel in The Little Mermaid proves that even mermaiding can be white-washed, and representation matters. The haters used the hashtag #notmyariel on Twitter but who knows what a mermaid or merperson should really look like?
That afternoon at The Grove, I sat next to Jack at the Mixer bar and ordered a cocktail. As the sun set, I asked if we could talk off-record. My iPhone kept running out of charge, but I also felt guilty and confused. I was really in LA because of a bad tutorial I had decades earlier at art school.
Back in the 90s, I had made an appropriated video that ripped off footage of Daryl Hannah as the mermaid Madison in the 1984 blockbuster, Splash. I loved Madison’s orange tail and as a child I had wanted to be her. But my feminist tutor was aghast. “This can’t be about Daryl Hannah,” she scolded. “Think about what the mermaid really means.”
And I did. Years later. In my early 40s, I spent two years Skyping professional mermaids and mermen, underwater photographers, historians, filmmakers, and mermaid tail-makers. I went to Copenhagen, New York, Florida, and LA, convinced I was going to write a bestseller about it. Who wants to be a project manager if you can be a mermaid instead? I asked all my interviewees, ‘What’s your favourite mermaid film?’ I wanted to talk about Splash, and I did.
“It kills me when kids these days haven’t seen Splash,” Jack joked during our interview. “She was the reference point.” I’d discovered that Jack and many mermaids knew Robert Short, the SFX designer who created the original Splash tail and that it had become an important prototype in the industry.
In person, I instantly warmed to Jack — I had only interviewed him once on Skype, but his graceful demeanour reminded me of my gay best friend from art school.
“Dark Tide tends to be sexier and edgier than other companies. I want the term to be a little polarising, we aren’t the girls and boys next door, I’ve never been that and I wouldn’t know how to be,” he says.
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Advertise with NZME.That suited me just fine. I also related hook and line and sinker to his company motto: “inspiring a workforce disenchanted with emotionless work”. Yes. That’s why I was chasing my mermaids, too. I needed some enchantment back in my life.
Stop. What did you want to be when you grew up? First, I wanted to be a palaeontologist. Now, I think I just liked the sound of the word, important and precocious. I wanted to go on adventures and discover new fossils, new worlds. I was a little girl who played with her dolls for too long — an only child, a dreamer, with freckles and buck teeth who once wanted to grow up to look like Daryl Hannah as the mermaid Madison, but I turned into a video artist instead, then a Showgirls barmaid in scuffed marching boots, then a poor London bookseller, then a project manager who couldn’t even type a sum into Excel! Then, a writer dying to meet the real mermaids…
My exhibition The Mermaid Chronicles is a big fat fluke — that’s what the epic fin at the end of each mermaid’s tail is called. A fluke. I’ve curated this art exhibition for the Adam Art Gallery because the myth of the mermaid dies hard. My exhibition is a hybrid containing showreels of five ‘real-life’ professional mermaids, alongside photographs, vintage artefacts, and contemporary artworks.
And yes, I’ve got Madison on display too. The medium-sized neoprene ‘Madison’ tail I bought from Finfolk Productions is hung over a towel rail on the gallery wall because I like to drive a point home.
But I’ve worked out that my art school tutor was right, mermaids are so much bigger than Madison. New York-based artist Olivia Erlanger’s Pergusa (Gris) is a sculpture of a silicone mermaid tail protruding from the open door of an industrial front-loader washing machine. In 2018, Erlanger first presented her disembodied mermaid tails at a laundromat in LA, and the show quickly went viral on Instagram.
For Erlanger, her mermaid tail sculptures are a “pre-gender or genderless archetype”, but for me it’s a symbol of the professional mermaid. That silverly silicone tail snaking out of the washing machine reminds me of a pair of Levi’s waiting to be slipped back on. The mermaid is a myth that won’t come of the wash, her tail must be embodied.
As curator, I’ve also got to play palaeontologist. I’ve dug up a vintage redheaded See Wees doll Coral on Etsy and bought her for $83.59. I made the mistake of putting my original doll in my primary school’s lucky dip barrel. In the exhibition, Coral is displayed on her lilypad sponge. I also bought the See Wees Clamshell Carrying Case with Kissing Fishes handle; now I didn’t own that as a kid, but I couldn’t resist. I made The Mermaid Chronicles for the See Wees doll inside me — and you.
I want you to come see the world upside-down through the porthole windows of the Wreck Bar based in the old Yankee Clipper Hotel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. For 16 years MeduSirena has run the only underwater burlesque shows in America there with her aquaticrew. Her atmospheric shows are inspired by the retro aqua-shows popular in the 50s and 60s.
MeduSirena is an icon in the mermaid community, an underwater techie who says, “We’re not built like dolphins. We’re built closer to manatees in the way we move. A manatee’s tail is built for ascension.”
Born in Puerto Rico, MeduSirena told me she owned a See Wees doll too. “They were my first dolls as a kid, starting with the brunette Shelly. I liked the See Wees Tropigals collection because they had my skin colour.”
Before anyone writes the mermaid off as child’s play, remember that doll play is important for the creation of empathy in children. It’s how we build internal state language, how we learn to speak to ourselves, and internalise other world views. Coral, come back! I miss you. Let’s play mermaids again.
Another exhibition highlight is a vintage fabric tail handsewn with diamantes that belonged to the Australian-born endurance swimmer, vaudeville performer and silent screen star, Annette Kellerman. Kellerman was a celebrity and successful businesswoman, who popularised the one-piece bathing suit for women at the turn of the century, and was also the first actress to perform as a mermaid in the film Neptune’s Daughter (1914.) She pioneered the art of aquaballet.
“Had it not been for her, none of us would be here today,” MeduSirena told me. “Kellerman should be in every history book.”
Our lives are deepened by the myth of the mermaid in surprising ways.
“I think pretty things are important,” the burlesque artist Julie Atlas Muz told me over Skype. It’s a ballsy comment from a performer who is a stone-cold classic. “I fully understand how hard it is to be a woman, we are constantly judged by our appearance, yet I think pretty things matter too. The mermaid is associated with the ocean, the womb of the world, and the performers in my show make it look graceful, serene, and feminine to be underwater. Even though they can’t breathe or see and sometimes get menaced by fish.”
For five years, Julie was the head mermaid at The Coral Room, a now-defunct hip-hop bar in New York, that had a 30,000-gallon salt-water tank installed behind the bar. Julie worked alongside a territorial Emperor Snapper — Sugar — who used to bite her costume and give her jip. “Fish are very sensitive to their environment.”
In the exhibition, Julie’s short film, High Art at Low Tide, gives a behind-the-scenes peek into a mermaid’s shift at The Coral Room.
“Fantasy is popular right now because people need escapism, people want to swim away into the depths of their unconscious,” Julie said.
The Mermaid Chronicles scales the depths of our unconscious mind, presenting sublime images and films of the mermaid as a slippery siren, forever desirable and unattainable.
In the window is a floor-to-ceiling poster by underwater photographer Brett Stanley of Hannah Mermaid in a kelp forest off Catalina Island. Hannah’s handmade silicone tail is festooned with sequins, and sprouts ankle fins; she gazes into the towering fronds of kelp as though it’s her own primordial garden, her hair snaking above her head in cornrows. Hannah can perform in the open ocean, at depths of 30-40 feet, without scuba gear. Her Twitter handle reads: Rumoured to be the world’s first freelance mermaid.
“She’s fearless,” Brett told me. “I’ve never met anyone as comfortable underwater as she is.”
In the early 2000s, Hannah lived in Byron Bay and attended a casting call for an ad to sell a bathroom tap that required the model to swim in a pool. Hannah got the job because she looked in her element, just like a mermaid. ‘That’s it’, she thought. She created her first tail out of a pair of flippers, duct tape, coat hangers, and a couple of boomerangs.
“This is a self-created job,” says Hannah. Now, she lives in LA and uses her mermaid identity as a ‘servant of the sea’ campaigning for the protection of cetaceans and sea life. “Mermaids represent a unique bridge between the human and ocean world… and offer a voice to communicate the environmental issues that face us at this point.”
In the gallery, Hannah’s showreel presents her swimming alongside tiger sharks and manta rays, but my favourite photo of her is as a little girl, wearing an orange tail made from a tablecloth and sitting by her family swimming pool.
“I had a poster of Daryl Hannah on the wall, and I tried to copy her tail as closely as I could,” she told me.
Her story is now writ in water. My story is writ in a PowerPoint called ‘This Can Be About Daryl Hannah’ and on display in my exhibition. It’s about the influence of Splash on the community of professional and recreational mermaids.
My life has come full circle. I’m not an artist anymore, but a writer and My PowerPoint is packed with quotes from real mermaids. It also includes a poster image from Splash of Daryl Hannah sitting on a giant fishing hook like bait, tempting a generation of us to live our dreams as mermaids.
I’ve heard the mermaids and I want you to hear them too. Have you answered your life’s calling yet? It’s not too late.
