The Whiting on the Wall

1980

mixed technique 97x57x14 cm (LED internally lit)

Dedicated to North Atlantic fishing restrictions

The writing on the wall is the well-known expression from the Torah, which signifies impending doom. To see the writing on the wall is to forecast one’s demise.

Here instead we see a ‘whiting’ - the fish - on a wall. In this way attention is drawn to the potentially calamitous situationof the North Sea, where overfishing and climate change (its temperature has risen by 1.5° since 1962) have had devastatingeffects on the numbers of fish and the entire ecosystem.

Text and images are often inseparable. The first complements the second, like a caption, or suggests a key with which to interpret the image.