The Widow’s Dream 2

I saw this photo in a book when I was visiting Portland, Dorset in 2016. It was taken outside the Cove Inn there in 1925 and shows two local fishermen showing off their catch of two huge skate and four sharks.

I was stirred by the sight of these alien creatures, their nostrils and mouths looking like sad faces in those big pale rhombuses. Did they still live in the seas around there, or had they all been hauled out? They seemed like dinosaurs maybe, the last of the hairy mammoths, the dodos. When the chance came to make a piece of work for b-side festival I thought this could be it.

At the Bristol Aquarium I discovered that they were probably Common Skate, so called because they were the most plentiful of our native skate, living up to a hundred years, the largest skate in the world, reaching up to 3 metres across. There aren’t any Common Skate living in the seas around Portland now, and their status is Critically Endangered. There are about 18 other species in UK waters, though many of these are also threatened. At the Aquarium they have a large tank of British rays and skate (none taken from the wild) and the aquarists were really helpful as I set about learning about them and filming them. My final film centred on a Blond Ray called Big Mama who put on a beautiful dance for me whilst waiting for her lunch to show up one day.

The film was shown on a small screen in a cabinet in the Cove Inn, which also contained some egg cases donated to me by the Aquarium (including one of Big Mama’s) and information about rays and skate.

I cropped the film to make two separate films which were projected simultaneously, from inside, into the upstairs and downstairs windows of a 17th century fisherman’s cottage nearby. Watched from the street, the skate seemed to be swimming inside the house, appearing as she passed by the windows.

b-side festival 2018. Top photo by Brendan Buesnel