For almost forty years, world-renowned jeweler Arline Fisch has pioneered the application of textile techniques in the creation of jewelry, but she has rarely forayed outside this realm. Creatures from the Deep, originally commissioned by Racine Art Museum in 2008, challenged the artist to bring her work to a grand scale, using knitting and crocheting techniques to create 'families' of jellyfish out of her signature color-coated copper wire.

Each of Fisch's 'families' in the installation varies dramatically in form and color, suggesting different species of jellies. A series of corals and sea anemones rest below, all fabricated in the same very small gauge of wire through hand and machine knitting and hand crochet.

Fisch first explored jellyfish in her silver work in the mid-1960s, fascinated by their many forms and brilliant colors, and then revisited the form in a necklace based on the Lion's Mane Jellyfish in 1999. For this commission, she again chose the creature as her theme, inspired by Racine Art Museum's proximity to the waters of Lake Michigan. The larger-than-life sea creatures in Fisch's installation, now traveling for the first time, seem right at home in the Puget Sound. Suspended in air and swaying together in the galleries, they submerse visitors in a captivating and otherworldly undersea environment.

Arline Fisch is a perennial figure in the metals community and author of the book Textile Techniques in Metal, published in 1975, 1996 and 2001. She is the Professor of Art Emerita at San Diego State University.

• #CreaturesFromTheDeep
• • Share this
  • Facebook
  • Twitter