I found myself standing at traffic lights waiting for the green man. Whilst I was absentmindedly staring into space, my dog Phil pulled towards the street bin for a sniff. I have always to look ahead of him to make sure he’s not sniffing at something he intends to eat. All clear, nothing harmful there, I loosened the lead. I did, however, notice an odd collection of books neatly piled beside the bin. Having always collected found objects of note to bring home, I didn’t think twice before bending down to pick up the book on top. It was old and weathered, the cover was a soft green material, broken edges and the covering spine was off to one side. It was still tightly bound and the title was clear, Freshwater Tropical Aquarium Fishes by Hervy & Hems. I flicked through it in one motion, seeing illustrations of fish dotted throughout. The drawings were enough for me to choose to take the book with me. The green man appeared, and we walked on to work.
Arriving at the studio I made coffee and sat down at the desk to look more closely at the book. I opened it randomly, ending up near the end, page 382. A strange looking fish drawn in pencil revealed itself. Half in and half out of the water, it appeared as if stretching using its fins to prop itself up onto land. There was a dignified ugliness to it, it seemed determined and proud with huge goggle eyes and outstretched fins. Underneath, a caption “Fig. 85. Periophthalmus barbarus”. What a strange fish.
‘A mudskipper’ it said as I started to read the description:
“It is a characteristic of these fishes that they spend more time out of water than in it. While out of water they keep the large gill-chambers filled with air and very often leave the tail hanging in the water, or otherwise keep it moist, to serve as an added organ of respiration. They remain out of water for hours on end, almost motionless, contemplating passing objects and occasionally snapping at flies”.
‘Contemplating passing objects’ an unusual thing to say about a fish, I thought. Do they really leave the water to experience the land? They ‘remain motionless for hours’, what else could they be doing, I’d guessed.
In the studio at the time, I was mostly photographing a particular rock I had found. The rock itself had no significance other than being an object for my cameras to try and understand. I thought if I used different cameras, film, digital and polaroid, each with their own idea of what was presented to them, I might come to illustrate something about perception and its subjective nature, or at least I could try. I had begun to consider the space between things and my own perception of the world, and that perception as a singular object. The idea of space started to expand and I wondered if there was something more than just distance between us. If we looked out to sea, do we see it the same way? I don’t know. I would go to the coast and look out there thinking about what could be getting lost in the space between us.
And I would make pictures there.
The mudskippers, it seemed to me, were little perceptual devices, just watching. As if they were trying to make sense of what they could see on land. I wondered about their experience in this world, and about the space of their consciousness and if a fish contemplates, what is it that holds their attention? Clearly these fish are very important creatures and so I set about finding them. I wanted to study them more closely. To see if they could shed any light on the questions I had been posing myself. Or just to be near them, to be in their field of vision and subject to their scrutiny. To feel the space between us as we both contemplate a life on land.
(Install video Life on Land at Platform Arts 2018)