I would find them in anything that could hold liquid: Tupperware in the fridge, toilets, humidifiers in closets, rain buckets, et cetera. The fish were barely moving; becoming buoyant in green-tinted water, swimming sideways in a tank where most of the water had evaporated, or they’d cannibalized half of a mate out of starvation. 

 

In the early years of this recurring nightmare, someone would usually arrive on scene to inform me it was my fault—that I’d been negligent as a fish caretaker. In the latter years, no one would come, but I knew. And I would wake up in all-consuming grief. 

 

For over 15 years I reckoned with my culpability, haunted by why I kept getting subpoenaed in my sleep to contend with a criminal charge of unintentional attempted fish murder, even though I always woke up before they were dead. When I started to make a correlation with the timeline, I realized that in those 15 years I had stopped making art. When I started to make art again, I would find the fish in a tank, but with a slice of pizza I would have on hand for them.

 

Of course, I was still admiring art during that time and taking in what I look to now as influential: Goya, Ken Price, Jean Dubuffet, Sidney Nolan, Rufino Tamayo, Dorothea Tanning, Fischli & Weiss, Mike Kelley—or most anything that felt like it was trying to laugh through a broken heart. The writings of naturalist Edward. O Wilson, Donna Haraway, poet Ern Malley and Goethe's ideas on "delicate empiricism" have influenced my work.