Fish Don’t Float

In 1990, Rob Wilson and I spent weeks creating a sculpture to enter in the White Rock Lake Floating Sculpture Festival.

We were so proud of it. We were allowed to leave art class to gather materials, so Rob drove us around rural east Plano, where our high school was located, until we found a stand of bamboo growing by the roadside (seriously, bamboo growing wild in Plano). We had the windows down and the cassette deck was blasting Henry Mancini’s “The Pink Panther Theme.”

We cut down bamboo, and later cut the fish out of foam core, painted them, hot-glued scales onto them (cut from a roll of transparent pale blue 2″ plastic film that Rob brought in), tied our bamboo together into a cage-like structure on top of a raft, tied the fish inside, added colorful streamers, and tossed it into the pond outside the art building for a test run. One corner of it was a little bit underwater, but other than that, we had ourselves a floating sculpture!

A week or so later, we hauled it down to White Rock Lake and quite ceremoniously, in front of a large crowd, heaved our Fish Out Of Water into the lake…. where it promptly sank to the bottom.

We were so embarrassed that we simply left. We didn’t stick around to see the other sculptures or to wait for the judging (where we would quite certainly have received the “Least Floaty Floating Sculpture” award). However, in our defense, we were competing against a pool of much older and more experienced established artists. We were just a couple of 17 year olds with some bamboo and hot glue.

We have a little video of the making of the Fish Sculpture… if I can find a way to get it off of DVD and onto YouTube, I’ll post it.

On an unrelated note, doesn’t the school look like a prison??