Visitors to Sambro have only to glance into the corner of the baseball field to get a cheerful welcome – from an enormous and colourful fish.
The fish is an art project that was completed in June by students at Sambro Ketch Harbour consolidated school, with Halifax artist Kyle Jackson.
Jackson calls the piece a “fish fence,” because it consists of plywood boards on posts, covered in cedar shingles which resemble scales. At one end of the fence is a board shaped like the head of the fish, and the other end features a moveable tail on hinges.
“I came up with the idea I don’t know how, it just popped in my head,” says Jackson. “I was trying to get some kind of sculpture that used local materials in a different way. So shingles sideways instead of up and down, and then you know there are wooden fences everywhere.”
Five years ago Jackson completed a similar fence in Louisbourg. He took five days to repeat the process with over 100 students from grades primary to six.
“I met them first thing Monday morning, showed them pictures of the other fish fence, talked about what the fish fence was, talked about how they’re the only ones in the cosmos aside from Louisbourg that have a fish fence, and how everybody should work together,” he says.
Jackson and his son Jasper distributed shingles to the students and asked them to decorate the shingles using oil pastels. The loose theme was their home community and the sea. Many students drew boats, houses, sea creatures, or oceanscapes, but others chose to draw everything from abstract designs to frogs and flowers.
“It was like a pep rally,” Jackson says. “They just went with it. They got inspired from one another, and with me egging them on, and just with their natural talent, which they had lots of.”
Jackson and his son built the framework for the fence with the older students, and nailed on the finished shingles. Jackson says he constructed the fence solidly so that it can stay in the community permanently.
“There was talk from the kids about the weathering or vandalism or stuff like that. I addressed that question with the answer that everything weathers and gets old and is affected by time, kind of like driftwood or pieces of old boats that wash up on shore, and they have their charm,” he says. “I think that the fish fence will start to look that way over time.”
“We talked about the properties of oil pastel and the cedar shingles, and how it will age a bit but it’ll look great for a long time.”
The fence certainly looks great now, and the students were very proud of their work.
“They loved it,” Jackson says. “Everybody went to the sculpture to find the one or two shingles that they made, so they had that kind of Where’s Waldo thing…They didn’t want us to go, they just wanted to make fish fences all year long.”
Jackson says that he will always remember how he helped the project along, but he soon began to feel that the fish fence was taking on a life of its own.
“It kind of reaches out and sucks everybody into it, and so it has that power to attract,” he says. “It’s like a giant magnet, and it just sucked everybody’s art and talent and colours up to it.”
weekly@hfxnews.ca
