Memories of Fish — Sally Clegg

Katy & Me (Memory of Fish, Westfield, 2008) appeared in the exhibition Being & Time, which centers on two fish-based memories. Both memories relate to imagination formation and a particular lifelong friendship with a woman named Chelsea Brown, who kept a red-finned betta during a period of her life when she lived in Westfield, Massachusetts. The piece involved the adopting a similar red-finned betta and giving it the same name (Katy) as well as using markers of the artist’s life and practice (self portraiture, 3D printing, art historical reference, aquascaping) to engineer a space where the friendship could coexist with the ultimately foreign and abstruse world of her art practice.