ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) — At Tingley Beach, there's a globe-shaped sculpture made of steel fish. The piece found its home next to the catch-and-release pond nearly twenty years ago, but the inspiration came long before that with an artist's North Dakota upbringing and an overseas trip.
"I grew up in a tiny town, so I could go anywhere I wanted from a young age by myself, with catchments, and frogs in the creek, and everything that goes along with that," said Colette Hosmer, the artist behind Fish Globe, who now resides in Santa Fe. "My whole early history in the art world had to do with natural things... I really didn't expect anyone or any gallery to be interested in the kinds of things I was doing. I was proven wrong."
In the coming years, Hosmer was invited to China 10 times for art-related trips. It was there she created a piece featuring fish pouring out of a large pipe. And when she was invited to submit a proposal for a piece along Tingley Beach in 2001, she decided to take the concept to the next level with a large sphere consisting solely of fish.
"I'd build sculpture with tens of thousands, likely millions of minnows that I would dry and arrange in specific, themes... I would use a white picture varnish on them," said Hosmer. "I just enlarged ideas of what I'd been doing for the decade before, and came up with the fish globe. I also liked the idea of art being so global and widespread, and the fact that people from other countries and languages and nationalities understood the work I was doing. It wasn't unique to just being in the art world in the United States."
Hosmer explained that with help from her daughter and son, she was able to submit her final presentation to the public art department the day before she left for China. From there, Fish Globe was officially approved, and the work began. The 12-foot structure of 450 steel fish measuring at two-and-a-half feet each required a crane to assemble. Hosmer's son, Scot Ferguson, played a major role in the fabrication.
"My son at that time had started his own studio of fabricating metal, and I looked around at other people and talked to some other fabricators, and finally thought, I'm going to talk with my son about this... I ended up giving him the fabrication job, and it was extraordinary," said Hosmer. " I had him build a wooden half of the sphere, a 12-foot structure, and he had a crane... Then he had to build an internal structure, and the reason I had him build an outside wooden form is because the outside of the sphere had to be perfectly uniform... We couldn't build it that way by eyeball, so I had to have the outside to lay these structures in and weld them from the inside... He moved the structure around as he needed to in this wooden exterior form until we had the perfectly round 12-foot globe."
Fish Globe took a few years to finish, first being approved in 2001, then officially erected at the site in 2006. Since then, Hosmer has worked on a myriad of other large-scale projects, including 28 fish at a convention Center outside of Tampa Bay, as well as other pieces in Salt Lake City and Iowa City. Although Hosmer says she still creates in that fashion, her main priority is currently with a different form of art.
"I've begun writing a book about the decade in China, and the 10 long terms that I went there for," said Hosmer. "It's just as hard and just as glorious, with the ups and downs of doing anything creative... It's on the same scale as making physical art."
You can find more of Hosmer's work on her website.
