Anjas’ Theme Of The Week: Fish week 7: The fishy art of Anne-Catherine Becker-Echivard

Sunday, 17 June 2012

Fish week 7: The fishy art of Anne-Catherine Becker-Echivard

The fishy art of Anne-Catherine Becker-Echivard

This artist must have the smelliest studio in the world, judging by her pungent art materials. But Anne-Catherine Becker-Echivard has certainly turned heads with her unique scaled-down depictions of everyday life.

The fishy art of Anne-Catherine Becker-Echivard

She creates lifelike scenes using fish heads placed on doll-like bodies. She uses familiar fish like sardines and mackerel to create the works. She buys the fish from Rungis food market just outside Paris, which is the largest in the world. The props and backdrops are painstakingly put together by Anne-Catherine while her mother makes the costumes."Each specific work can take up to three months from start to finish," Catherine says. "Each new idea starts with a snippet from the radio or from the newspaper about an issue such as HIV/Aids which has caught my attention. I then sketch out a scene and then begin to build my fish art according to my design". She doesn't use digital photography, using negative-film cameras instead.

The fishy art of Anne-Catherine Becker-Echivard

"Sometimes the idea or scene will evolve during the creative process and this will mean going back to square one," she says. When she's photographed the scene, she throws the fish heads away. "Fish are a great method of communicating my opinions on this world," says 37-year-old Anne-Catherine, who now lives in Berlin. "Not unlike stylised comics or Charlie Chaplin's caricatures, using fish can be a very obviously silly way of expressing a variety of emotions. "Just because these are fish heads on top of tiny models, it does not mean that people can not recognise the situations put in front of them and how that resonates with them".