Starfish
Starfish on Gordon Young’s ‘Fish Trail’ in Hull
Starfish
Introduction
I begin this essay with a visit to the starfish on Gordon Young’s Fish Trail round Hull – the starting point from which this mixed bag of art and ‘fish’ ideas unfold and take shape. Young’s starfish is carved from and attached (like a limpet) to a ‘natural boulder’ alongside Mussel and Warty Doris on the city trail. As I write, this rock sits on a blue wooden pallet removed from its original position and inaccessible behind barriers as the paving alongside Hull Marina is removed and replaced. Starfish is in the thick of urban development and change whilst fossil records reveal that the species have survived 5 (one for each starfish arm) mass extinctions to inhabit oceans and waters’ edges for over 450 million years.
Some of Young’s other fish nearby are carved, burnt, or engraved onto flat quayside paving stones recalling historical moments when ships arrived at the docks in Hull and landed their catch. Starfish is more three dimensional – moulded into a dip at the top of a rock - conjuring up an intertidal, ebbing and flowing, rockpool home in stark contrast to the surrounding traffic, crowds, businesses, and construction sites. He/she/they (more of that later) is out of place/out of water in this busy intersecting corner spot.
I sit close to the rock on the steps of the Murdock footbridge (built since the trail was opened) – facing the Humber Estuary - with Hull and the busy A63 behind (north), the Marina (and former Humber dock) to my right, and solicitors and bars stretching away left. Further down is Humber Street and the Fruit Market cultural regeneration area. Starfish is situated about halfway between the busy city centre and the open spacious estuary amidst building, rubble, barriers, hard hats, uprooted and disappeared fish, and keep out notices. In-between old and new paving, and an industrial, warehouse, fishing past and a regenerated future. Starfish’s more natural rockpool home is also in-between - high and low tide - where land and water meet with twice daily environmental shifts back and forth. Species living in shallow intertidal places adjust to temperature and salinity fluctuations and have respiratory adaptations to help them extract some oxygen from the air. Starfish also live on deep seabeds, mangrove and seagrass areas, coral reefs, estuaries, frozen seas, and tropical and sub-tropical waters.
To situate myself further I imagine 5 starfish arms radiating out from this point and the different directions they reach out to. Visualise a clockface or dartboard with a starfish bull’s eye. At 12 o’clock, one arm reaches straight across the Humber to the south bank. At 12 mins past, an arm crosses Hessle Rd, North Ferriby, and joins the Humber around Welton. The 24 past arm passes over two shopping centres, the top of Spring Bank, and the pond at Pearson Park before travelling onwards - eventually to the North Sea. The arm at 36 past crosses the river Hull behind Hull College and across East Park Lake before also joining the North Sea. Finally, at 48 mins past, an arm crosses the river Hull, The Deep, and cuts across the curl of the Humber to Fort Paull, (further along the north bank), and over Holderness to meet the North Sea just above Spurn Point.
I further envisage these arms stretching longitudinally around the world to meet at a point diametrically opposite Hull (draw a line from Hull to the centre of the earth and continue until it emerges the other side) in a giant starfish hug – like the way their arms mould into and around a rocky surface and the way a cricketer holds the ball prior to bowling. I imagine this hug touching all the different starfish habitats around the world.
Starfish is carved into the kind of rock they might naturally find themselves on - by a tide pool, in the shallows, deposited by one tide and awaiting the next. I’m continuing this starfish exploration through other painted, collaged, or sculpted examples from art history – as a kind of lens to focus my investigation – my particular ‘way in’. I’ve chosen 5 - one for each starfish arm - also one for each ocean (there are starfish in all 5). I’ve approached each artwork as if the represented starfish is at its centre or heart. A traditional painting unfolds from the vanishing point of linear perspective – I’ve tried to shift this focal point to the starfish and sometimes imagined their point of view. This is complicated as they have eyes or eyespots at the end of each arm which sense the light/dark contrasts that surround them. (How does perspective work for a starfish?).
Before starting, I should say that starfish aren’t fish at all but invertebrates and echinoderms and more accurately called sea stars. They are closely related to sea urchins and parted evolutionary company from fish billions of years ago. Sea stars don’t have a centralised brain or heart, or blood circulating round their bodies. There are over 1,600 different species, not all with 5 arms, (although this is the most usual arrangement) - they can have up to 40. This also means that sea stars might have anywhere between 5 and 40 eyes.
5 is also a magical prime Fibonacci (1,2,3,5, 8...) number which opens connections to the golden ratio, pentagons, and Pythagorean triples (3,4,5) …
Scarborough, Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1825.
Scarborough, Turner, 1825. from Tate archive https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-scarborough-d18142
My first example is a Turner seascape, painted exactly 200 years ago, and close to home in Scarborough. The view crosses South Bay in the foreground towards the harbour with the headland, church, and castle behind. There is a sense of looking down at the beach scene nearby and across to the light-soaked colour washes of cliff and sky in the distance. The beach is busy with work – a ship landing its catch, a woman shrimping, clothes being washed at the water edge. Amongst this activity is a ‘small and pale coral coloured starfish’ on the flat sand towards the front of the painting in line with the edge of the tallest castle tower. According to Alice Rylance Watson a starfish was a ‘curious feature’ of all Turner’s Scarborough paintings after 1809 (like an extra signature?). She suggests this is symbolic of a specific memory[i]. I wonder what particularly caught and held his fascination and whether this was a childhood recollection.
Turner made several trips around the North, and some claim these experiences transformed him into a ‘poet of the sublime’. He painted the effects of light particularly at sunrise and sunset where solid forms sometimes dissolve into broad washes of pale colour. I am drawn to the connection and coexistence of these large distant expanses of sea and sky and the small and particular detail of the starfish close by. As if the whole scene is anchored by this tiny echinoderm - without which it would just float away.
I recall reading how deep diving sperm whales travel between the top and bottom of the ocean connecting, in years gone by ‘the lighthouses that illuminated the surface waves and the dark depths below’ (when blubber was used as lamp oil).[ii] Starfish are associated with shallow waters but some species live at depths of up to 6,000 metress and this creates a similar connection between the highest thing visible in the night sky with the deepest point below on the seabed. With everything else in between. Maybe this magical above/below relationship caught Turner’s childhood imagination. Five years after Scarborough Turner painted The Evening Star - a flat sparse scene of sky and sea, a boy shrimping, his dog, and a touch of thick white paint in the darkening sky.
Scarborough is full of echoes – two cliffs, two piers, people and masts reflected in the sea and wet sand. These pictorial doubles suggest a relationship between the starfish and a night star – reflections of one another and made from the same star stuff (as are shrimps, boys, and dogs). Cosmically related but separated by unfathomable amounts of time and space. The deeper areas of the ocean are named the twilight and midnight zones, and some argue this underwater world is more remote and strange to us than the night sky and outer space. Starfish living in shallow water are especially affected by the moon’s gravitational pull which creates the tidal rhythms governing life in intertidal zones. In addition, some species pay homage to the sun - ‘Common Sun Star’ is orangey-red with 10 or 12 arms like sun rays, and ‘Sunflower Sea Star’ is the largest of the species with arms up to 1 metre long.
Starfish live between 10 and 35 years but the one in Turner’s painting won’t survive for long unless the waves pull them back into the ocean - they don’t survive completely out of water for more than 5 minutes.
Beach with Starfish, John Piper, 1933-34
My next example moves us into the 20th century, over 100 years after Scarborough, to a collage with printed papers, gouache, and ink. This is one of several works I found featuring starfish made during or just before WW2. We also travel to the south coast and the distinctive silhouette of the Seven Sister chalk cliffs in Sussex. Turner’s thin, layered watercolour washes reflect the fluid qualities of water and sky in contrast to Piper’s abrupt fragmented surface of shapes cut from mass produced publications, alongside scratchy marks and dots, dabs, and dashes of paint. Pictorial space is much flatter, closer, more immediate.
Despite the abstractions and experimentations, Piper clearly depicts a beach scene with a rockpool in the central foreground, cliffs rising sharply from the beach and curving away slightly into the shallow distance, a choppy sea, and a stormy cloud ridden sky. The cliff faces are cut from The New Statesman and Nation (who Piper wrote for) where the angle of the text articulates the angle of the cliffs and pages overlap to distinguish things in front and behind. The regularity of the mechanically produced lines contrast with the haphazard and varied application of paint. We can read these lines visually as signifying an angle, a texture, or even rock strata - or we can read them literarily as words. The articles are legible and concern the economic situation in Britain and Germany - 'The Unemployment Bill under Fire' and 'Nazi Economics'. It’s very likely these were deliberate choices that contribute to how we read and interpret the collage. The political writing shifts our thoughts about the beach – from a natural scene to a place for potential invasion and enemy landings. I recall Picasso’s Synthetic Cubist collages, also made in precarious pre-war years (WW1) and whether the newspaper columns (often placed at contrasting angles or upside down) were visual or literary clues – or both. This makes me think how we also ‘read’ nature in this collage – particularly the stormy sky and rough sea.
Meanwhile in the rockpool, Piper includes 2 fish, 2 seaweeds, and 4 starfish. Some of these elements are cut from scientific books and some drawn/painted. Unlike Turner’s tiny touch of orangey paint, Piper’s starfish are larger than life and strangely upright (although this could be the result of looking down at the pool – in the spirit of the multi perspectives of Cubism). Starfish move along (not perpendicular to) rock or sand surfaces using thousands of tube feet that cover the underside of their arms.
Collage involves the artist working with existing printed imagery and text, rather than starting from scratch – some of which might be throwaway rubbish. The pages are reused, repurposed, and transformed. I’ve read how nothing goes to waste underwater – dead sea animals, plants, and debris that finds their way into the sea become habitat or food for someone/thing else. Maybe this also recalls the way starfish can transform themselves by regenerating lost limbs. Investigating torn, cut, drawn, hard or soft borders and edges in the collage leads to thoughts of beaches and coastlines as geographical and political borders - highly charged places that evoke anxiety about conflict, identity, migration, and displacement.
I’ve valued observing and reading about the conflicts and coexistences of seashore life where wracks, weeds, kelp, fish, limpets, mussels, starfish etc. compete, accommodate, and thrive within a web of balanced tensions.[iii] In addition, marine life make extraordinary migrations – from water to land, rivers to sea, daily trips up and down the beach, or vertically from top to bottom of the sea, and annual mass expeditions and relocations of thousands of miles. These journeys are vital to ecosystems as nutrients are circulated round the planet and carbon is moved from the top to the bottom of the ocean.
Piper’s collage brings this investigation of starfish in art history into a 20th century industrial (mass produced) world with its environmental impacts. In comparison to Turner’s painting, Piper’s beach is empty of people, work, and reflections in water. The content of the cliff newspaper columns creates a sense of foreboding – of something calamitous about to happen - and a context of conflict and invasion. This makes me think how climate change looms over us today, like Piper’s cliffs, and the impacts of ocean acidification, extreme weather events, and food and water shortages on vulnerable communities and species - on human and more than human migrations.
Marine Object, Eileen Agar, 1939.
My third example was made just 5 years later in 1939 at the outset of war and by the first of my female artists. Marine Object is a sculptural artwork and like Gordon Young’s stone carving has a starfish placed at the top of the piece (although Agar’s is positioned vertically rather than horizontally). Like Piper she takes a collage approach – but hers is a 3-dimensional assemblage of existing found objects – some natural and man-made - whilst Piper combines existing images with his own painting. The Tate list the materials as ‘terracotta, horn, bone and shells’. The central object is a Greek amphora (vase/container) that Agar found broken in two and caught in a fishing net, in a small French fishing port. Propped up against this is a ram’s horn found in Cumberland. The other objects, including the crowning starfish, are objects she’d collected over the years – particularly on seashores. It’s not clear from photographs how/if these are connected in their pile like combination - but they look cohesive, almost made from the same material – as if they belong together (unlike Piper’s elements which clash and jar together on the picture surface). Marine Object appears weathered, textured and encrusted as if found as treasure on a sunken wreck. It also looks like the kind of beach sculpture/sandcastle you might make from disparate objects found washed up along the shore.
Agar was born in Bueno Aires – her father was Scottish and her mother American. She travelled widely in Britain and Europe and met many key figures from the Surrealist movement. She was one of only a few women artists who exhibited in the Surrealist exhibition in 1936 in London – although she didn’t fully embrace the label Surrealist as a description of her work. She did, however, use and transform found objects in the spirit of Duchamp and Dada (although her found objects were often natural rather than man-made) and employed the Surrealist collage/assemblage technique, whereby unexpected and chance juxtapositions trigger unconscious responses and unleash new meanings. She described 'a form of inspired correction, a displacement of the banal by the fertile intervention of chance or coincidence'.[iv] The elements in Marine Object sit well together – colour, texture, and shape wise it make sense so that at first glance we accept this odd assemblage. However, the Greek vase, starfish, and ram’s horn combination is the stuff of dreams in the way it conjures up ancient and modern, life and death, sea and land.
As a practising female artist throughout much of the 20th century Agar challenged gender norms. She was rebellious and experimental in art and life and fascinated by natural forms, especially fossils. Agar wrote about male/female relationships in terms of the natural world: ‘The sea and the land sometimes play together like man and wife, and achieve astonishing results’.[v] She also linked physical and artistic birth as ‘womb-magic, the dominance of female creativity and imagination’.[vi]For some female artists associated with Surrealism seascapes can express the ‘ebbing and flowing fluidities of sexuality and gender’ and many have connected the underwater world of hidden, unknown, and wonderful creatures with the depths and mystery of the unconscious self.[vii] Others identify an intermediate, zone between the unconscious and conscious, as a place of possibility where imaginary acts unfold – a place which maybe finds an echo or reflection in the intertidal zone
There is much to be learnt about gender fluidity and identity from marine life and starfish in particular. An individual starfish can be male, female or a hermaphrodite. They can reproduce sexually or asexually, and certain species can switch between genders. For example, the cushion star (Asterina gibbosa) has male babies. At a certain point in their development the male starfish stop producing sperm and starts making eggs. This kind of gender change is called sequential hermaphroditism.[viii] Asexual reproduction is connected to starfish’s ability to regenerate lost limbs. In the case of brittle stars, for example, if the split involves the central disc, then both body parts can grow into new brittle stars in a process that’s a bit like cloning. In other species (Nepanthia belcheri) the female starfish can reproduce by splitting in half, but the resulting offspring are male.
Shells and Starfish, 1941, M C Escher
Now to Escher and a hop of just 2 years from Marine Object. Shells and Starfish is a study of repeated, rotated, reflected, and tessellated forms. Escher was a graphic artist and saw illustration as preliminary to the production of multiple images via craft processes such as woodcut, lithograph, and mezzotint. There is something enticing about Escher’s love of design, where one or more bounded shape(s) is repeated across a surface to create an image or pattern itself to be produced in multiple. This is like the multiplication of multiplication or squaring a number in mathematics. It also strikes me that he embraces limitation – both in his task of exploring and filling a flat plane with repeated shapes and in the printmaking processes he uses to produce them. He was influenced by early travels to southern Italy, where he made numerous studies of nature, and to Spain and the Moorish architecture where he encountered the repeat pattern of the Alhambra. In addition, he investigated ideas from mathematics, geometry, and crystallography
Escher creates an exciting dynamic pattern – the eye easily spots relationships and surprises – but these visual discoveries are hard to put into words. Shellfish and Stars comprises 3 basic shapes – a light coloured 5-armed starfish, a fanned maybe cockle shell with distinctive curved bands of colour, and a whelk like shell. In one quarter of the design 4 starfish meet in a squarish format – the tips of their arms touching at a shared point – each is a reflection or rotation of the other. The fanned cockle shells appear as the shapes between the starfish arms (or the starfish appear as the spaces between the cockle shells) and these shells also touch and rotate around the meeting spot. This group of 4 starfish and 4 cockle shells are then repeated 4 times (in a grid) across the surface and the whelk like shells appear in the gaps between the starfish arms – or vice versa.
This is a repeat pattern of interlocking shapes which we could imagine continuing for ever. There are no spaces between things, everything slots together like a jigsaw puzzle. This means there isn’t a relationship between positive and negative space. This makes for a busy dynamic surface – sometimes the starfish come to the fore and the cockles recede and then the opposite happens. Escher, in relation to another artwork, described how you can never see the objects simultaneously because they ‘function alternatively as one another’s background’.[ix] Because of the repetition this is a democratic surface with no single focal point. Each piece plays its part. Escher talks about a playfulness or ‘fooling around’ in his work to challenge certainties and ‘mix up two- and three-dimensionalities, flat and spatial, and to make fun of gravity’. [x]
This account of the composition recalls my earlier description of the accommodations and competitions of seashore life, where species coexist in a web of tension, and where each has their place and time to come to the fore. I read about this in Adam Nicholson’s Life between the Tides – an account of two seashore pools he made in Argyll on the west coast of Scotland and his observations of the marine life that found their ways there. He watches the prawns in the pool and finds ‘aspects of himself there’ – noting how prawns and people are similarly arranged around a central axis. I thought about starfish – what do we see – something in common or something alien? I also thought about how Escher highlights the beauty of different kinds of symmetry. Starfish have, for example, 5-point radial symmetry, meaning their bodies can be divided into 5 parts where each section can be rotated onto another.[xi] Humans and prawns have bilateral symmetry where one side of the body is the reflection of the other along a central axis. Starfish don’t have a left or right half or a top and bottom – but they do have a top and underside. In one way they seem vastly different from us – but all we need to do is stretch out the fingers of one hand or stretch our arms and legs out to touch the circumference of an imaginary circle, like da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, - and we can find connections. Starfish don’t have a centralized brain (as we know it) – rather a decentralized nervous system – a network of nerves and neurons distributed throughout their bodies. This network allows them to move, think, learn, remember and process information, and sense and respond to their environment. Nicholson writes beautifully about consciousness and how prawns distinguish between ‘us and not us’. He argues that prawns and humans share a sense of ‘being in the world’, a past and a future, an imagination, and ‘a sense of what it feels to be alive’.[xii]I imagine the same is true of starfish.
Lost Volume: a catalogue of disasters, 1993, Cornelia Parker
With kind permission from Cornelia Parker. Image from The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
My last example comes from the end of the 20th century and is a page in a published artist book. Parker is the champion of squashing, crushing, transforming, suspending, and representing ordinary things and moments. The book is signed and there are 30 copies. Looking through it appears as if a mixed bag of unrelated objects has been pressed flat between the pages – the objects leaving their imprint on the paper. These objects are a bugle, a starfish, a light bulb, toy soldiers, and a paint tube which also leaves behind a stain. Apparently, as the reader turns the pages, they are drawn to touch the indent or imprint on the page which would be like embossed paper. Something to sense and feel as well as see. In actual fact the surface is flat and smooth, and each page presents a photograph rather than an imprint. Parker achieved this by crushing each object in a press between sheets of paper then photographing the resultant flattened object and its indentation.
There are connections to be made and stories to be created about the disparate objects here. In a similar way to Agar’s starfish, amphora, and ram’s horn assemblage, relationships can be made between the apparently random juxtaposition of a bugle, starfish, and toy soldiers. There is also artifice, illusion, and deception – like the trompe-l’oeil tricks and illusions found in painting where you can’t believe your eyes. The flattening of solid objects (also in the title Lost Volume) has a parallel in photography, painting, and drawing where the 3-dimensional world is represented on a 2-dimensional surface. Photographs capture and ‘draw with light’ and the 3 dimensionality of the imprint is revealed through subtle changes in light and shade.
Parker destroys (crushes, explodes), transforms, and re-presents objects – for example in 30 Pieces of Silver and Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View. In both cases the resultant objects appear in dramatically lit installations whereas starfish is secreted away in the pages of a book. Like finding some flowers you’d forgotten pressing in a book you just happen to have picked up – starfish is like a message from the past. In this way Lost Volume reminds me of a fossil – the preservation of physical remains, impressions, or traces that have been buried in sand or mud over time. Discovering a fossil on a rocky beach connects us to life, nature, and climates from the distant past and their messages to us today.
Parker presents a starfish and its imprint – which is its negative impression moulded into/onto the soft paper. This sense of an impact or effect very obviously leads to the thought of what individually and as a species we leave behind and is most dramatically evident in the concept of our carbon footprint. The health of starfish species can be a warning of ecological harm - such as sea temperature rises and ocean acidification – starfish are vulnerable to declining oxygen levels in the sea. From 2013 to 2017 the sunflower starfish (and over 20 other species) were devastated by a global outbreak of sea star wasting syndrome. The IUCN estimated that 5.75 billion were killed by the disease which constitutes the biggest marine disease outbreak on record. This had a widespread impact - for example resulting in sea urchin overgrazing on kelp forests which provide crucial habitats for marine species as well as sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This caused ecosystem chaos as food webs collapsed, and kelp forests were killed off.
Starfish are important reminders that you can’t detach or destroy one thing without everything else being affected. Some species are keystone or apex predators – the removal of which can lead to local extinctions. Bob Paine carried out some very early research on this phenomenon in 1963 when he removed a starfish species (Pisaster) from the shoreline on a short stretch of the Washington coast. He watched mussels and barnacles appear and then become crowded out, seaweeds disappear alongside limpets, sponges, and anemones. He called this a ‘tropic cascade’ in the ‘delicate tangle of interactions and effects’ as the diversity of species ‘crashed.’[xiii]
Parker’s semi hidden pale, bleached like coral, starfish is the last of my 5 art history studies. I began with Gordon Young’s carved life-size starfish in the middle of Hull, and this led me to investigate 5 apparently unrelated artworks - each featuring a starfish. Through these artworks and their starfish, I found myself reflecting on human and more than human experiences of gender, identity, migration, conflict, and climate change. I thought about what humans and starfish have in common and the ways we are strangers to one another. Thanks to Turner when I see a star in the sky I automatically think about its ‘twin’ on a beach or seabed somewhere. His night and sea stars fascinate me. The shape of this essay is in a way star like – radiating from a central point to which I return when I’ve wandered too far. Starfish is the fixed point around which this writing revolves. I’ve learnt about their ways of being in the world – adaptable and vulnerable in the face of climate change - and the crucial part starfish play in ocean ecosystems.
[i] Alice Rylance Watson, catalogue entry for Scarborough, Tate website, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-scarborough-d18142 (March 2013)
[ii] Helen Scales, The Brilliant Abyss (London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2022) p. 55.
[iii] Adam Nicholson, Between the Tides (London: William Collins, 2021) p. 81, 82.
[iv] Toby Treves, catalogue entry for Marine Object, Tate website, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/agar-marine-object-t05818 (2000)
[v] See encyclopedia entry: https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/agar-eileen-1899-1991
[vi] Andrew Lambirth, entry in Art UK, ‘Eileen Agar, and the masterpiece in the attic’, https://artuk.org/discover/stories/eileen-agar-and-the-masterpiece-in-the-attic (July, 2018)
[vii] See exhibition Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes 23 Nov 2024 - 21 April 2025 at The Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield
[viii] See https://animals.mom.com/starfish-gender-11461.html
[ix] M.C. Escher, Escher on Escher: Exploring the Infinite (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989) p. 35. and 21
[x] Ibid., p. 21
[xi] See https://www.thoughtco.com/facts-about-sea-stars-2291865
[xii] Nicholson, Between the Tides, see chapter 2 – ‘Prawn’ pp.34 – 63.
[xiii] Ibid., p.154 and chapter 6 – ‘Heraclitus on the shore’.
Artist: Jill Howitt
Fish Profile:
Starfish
Conservation status
There are well over 1,600 species of Starfish or Sea Stars – which are in fact invertebrates and not fish at all. They are classified as echinoderms, alongside urchins and sponges.
The Sunflower Sea Star (Pycnopodia helianthoides) is Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List. From 2013 to 2017 the species (and over 20 other Sea Star species) were devastated by a global outbreak of sea star wasting syndrome. The IUCN determined a 90.6% decline from historic to current population sizes and estimated that 5.75 billion were killed by the disease which constitutes the biggest marine disease outbreak on record. There is evidence that rising sea temperatures contribute to the seriousness of the disease and there are ongoing local outbreaks. The decline of Pycnopodia impacts ecosystems – for example resulting in sea urchin overgrazing on kelp forests which provide crucial habitats for marine species as well as sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.