The Sea Trout Shoals of Old

Charcoal
8x6ft

The sea trout recently started to appear in my mind as a fish that should be celebrated and treasured, and I’ve been thinking about humanities relationship to migratory fish such as salmon and sea trout and in particular those people that lived in close proximity to them. Around 30 years ago I visited Seattle and the art that stayed in my mind is the prints made by the Coastal Salish people. These prints are bold graphic statements that celebrating and honour their relationship to the natural world and in particular to the salmon. A sacred fish that gives and sustains life to the people the animals the trees the rivers and Honoured though their art which is deeply spiritual and symbolic. In Scotland the Pictish peoples also artistically celebrated the salmon as a sacred fish, a miracle that runs the rivers in great numbers giving food and life.

Although it can’t be proved , I think some of the early peoples of Shetland would also have honoured the sea trout in similar ways as above because some of the dwellings i.e. Scord of Brouster and settlements were in places where there would have been huge numbers of these migratory fish , gifts from the ocean , like the geese that appear in autumn, a sacred food source to be honoured and celebrated. The environment would have been perfect for the sea trout, that swan here in large numbers, so many that hotels were built in part around them such as the clousta hotel to accommodate the tourist trade of anglers.

As the population global humanity has grown and ever more pressure has been inflicted on the land, air and water, to generate power, feed everyone and provide recourses we have become ever more out of sync with the natural world, seeing it as a commodity that we can use and abuse, destroying habitats and ecosystems forcing ever more creatures to extinction.

Part of my reason for bringing the sea trout back into consciousness through art is to celebrate their presence in the past, the present and hopefully future.

The sea trout shoals of old that once swam around the coast of Shetland have now mostly gone. When I first arrived in Shetland in 1997 one of the first paintings, I did was an egg tempera called ‘Even the fish Cried’. I didn’t understand what I was painting but I was picking up on a deep sadness from the sea, something was wrong, even the fish were crying. I still don’t understand that sadness of the sea from an ecological perspective, but what in part I think I was picking up on were the absence of Sea Trout in places they should have been. Some would put the blame firmly and only with the industrial salmon farming industry with their open cages in the voes that are the home to sea trout. Industrial quantities of sea lice, algal blooms, desertification of the seabed, and in the early days release of toxic chemicals to treat sea lice have all taken their toll on the decline and survival of sea trout in the sea. However, the wider picture consists of multiplicity of contributory factors such as anglers taking too many fish, the once endemic culture of set gill nets, global warming with its disruption of food supplies, acid rain, sheep dip in spawning burns, spawning burns blocked by poorly thought-out construction projects, and an increase in seal population.

Despite a 10-year restocking programme by Shetland Anglers Association, where almost every burn in Shetland was stocked with sea trout fry, the current picture is a sad shadow of what it once was. Ecologists use the term ‘baseline’ ecology to refer to an original untouched by human’s state. The problem for most of us is that the baseline is what we remember from childhood or what was passed onto us by grandparents. It is near impossible to reimagine an ecological scenario in an untouched state, if indeed such a state existed in the first place. With the case of Sea trout in Shetland the large shoals of large fish of old have undeniably disappeared.