This week I felt I further developed my lines of enquiry.
I wanted to explore how these fish can be reclassified, but needed to understand through which lens I wanted to do that. I discovered this week that These drawings were made in early 1865, on an expedition with Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology founder and director Louis Agassiz.
Agassiz’s goal was to investigate the distribution of Brazil’s freshwater fish species to prove Creationism is more valid than Darwinism, especially since he was against the theory of Darwinism. creationism is the religious belief that the universe, earth and life were created by supernatural divine acts, rather than life forms developing through evolution (darwinism).
(unfortunately, that was not the outcome of the trip, but the illustrations greatly helped in providing a large bank of information on the under explored topic of freshwater fish.)
that lead to my questions:
1. How can redefining the set prove Agassiz’s Creationist theory?
2. How can redefining the set prove that scientific taxonomic classification systems are arbitrary?
I discovered the works of Ernst Haeckel, who developed beautiful scientific plates of jellyfish, other marine creatures, and insects, in a style that rested in between scientific illustration and art.
I felt moved. I felt that these creatures were created by god.
I knew I needed to emulate this to help bukhardt’s drawings prove agassiz’s point.
I created some plates, but they looked very flat when I printed them out.
I realised the digital process of printing was flattening my work, and i wanted to explore if a more physical medium might bring them to life, which is when I turned to silkscreen.
though the plates were the same, the ink, varied colours and tactility of the paper helped bring them to life. they started looking more lively and interesting, and approached the point of making these fish look like divine creatures.
if I had more time, I would explore more compositions for my fish.