There is a delicious sense of contradiction wrapped up in our collective fascination with the icon of the mermaid. At once a figure of childhood escapism and a site of sexualised fantasy, the mermaid represents a vast spectrum of projected desires.
The first two iterations of this figure that we glimpse in Megan Dunn's exhibition render these contradictions immediately apparent. In Brett Stanley's photograph , Hannah is pictured gracefully floating within a forest of kelp, her body transformed into that of a mermaid by an elaborate iridescent tail. Stretching beyond human life-size, Hannah Mermaid fills the external facing window of Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, transforming it into an underwater idyll. As she floats vertically within towering pillars of dense kelp, the movement of the ocean gently ruffles her hair and the fin-like tendrils of her tail. This is the mermaid as figure of fantasy and escapism, an image of hyper-feminine beauty and grace, entirely at home in her underwater environment. A scattering of oxygen bubbles trace a pattern across the oceanic blue, signalling the inherent danger involved in the creation of this image. While Hannah's elegant pose
