Verbal Description Transcript:

Fish dates from 1942. It’s made of steel rod, wire, string, glass, mirror, porcelain, pottery, and paint. It’s a hanging sculpture, measuring 1 foot 3 inches high by about 3 feet wide. The sculpture hangs from the ceiling by a single wire. It’s a delicate piece – the shape of the fish is created in outline only, not in solid form: it’s like a single-line drawing in space. The simplified body of the fish is formed out of steel rod, bent to shape and painted a shiny reddish brown. The fish is shown in profile – open mouth at one end, tail at the other. A loop in the steel rod creates the outline of a big round eye. Inside the loop, hanging on a string, is an oval chunk of bottle-green glass, suggesting the eyeball. The fish’s body is interlaced with curving lines of bent wire suggesting scales. The wire is painted the same red as the steel body. The void in the center of each scale is hung with a chunk of glass, pottery or broken mirror. Each jagged and uneven fragment is looped round with wire, which is in turn attached to a short length of string. The string is tied off to the top of each wire fish scale. The fragments range in color: some are clear glass or silvered pieces of mirror; there are coral reds and ambers; and pottery in different shades of blue. One piece of broken pottery shows a fragment of blue and white border patterned with birds. Another royal blue fragment has a ridged texture. Each dangling fragment can rotate on its own piece of string: so, for example, the green glass eye is sometimes seen sideways on, showing only a narrow slit. And the whole fish can rotate on its wire and be viewed in different aspects. As the light hits the sculpture, its colors shimmer. The whole sculpture is duplicated in shadow form on the wall behind it.