Salmon as a metaphor for organ donation
At the end of their lives, sockeye salmon travel upstream from the ocean to rivers, swimming and jumping up waterfalls to find the perfect place to spawn. (This is what’s happening when we see bears catching jumping salmon).
These are Atlantic salmon, but most salmon go through the same process in their lives.
I’m choosing a (male) sockeye salmon as the main statue because I think they are a recognizable and beautiful fish in their spawning form—though their red color is absolutely not appropriate for a statue within a hospital, so I think I want to cast in in bronze or copper.
The organ donation committee feel its important for the installation to be inclusive—which I find difficult to do if I made figurative pieces of humans. Though I could do it and it’s possible, I feel like anything I would make including human forms wouldn’t be as interesting as something I could make without using human forms. To make such a installation would require making multiple kinds of people in some way or another, and then the piece becomes about diversity & inclusion rather than a memorial. Maybe that’s what they want. But I can’t help but include my perspective in this because I know someone who donated their organs and I feel like anything I could come up with that would perfectly lines up with what the committee wants wouldn’t be something that person would like. At the same time I feel like following my gut on this may naturally result in something they like as opposed to someone with no experience in organ donation. There’s also a part of me that’s biased because I imagine the committee is full of doctors, and for a long time my experience with organ donation made me resentful or distrustful of organ donation & doctors for quite a while—a feeling they want to dispel in the public so more people will donate. That’s why what I’m proposing isn’t asking the public to consider signing up for donation—my intention is to represent and honor how one person can change the lives of others. In my case, it was because he donated his organs, sure, but that person I knew had more of an impact on people he knew throughout his life than he ever did after he died. It’s not just about him; I think the sentiment of what I’m proposing is felt by many people who lost someone who donated regardless of how they feel about the process or the person who died.
Using animals lends itself easily to being inclusive because it’s easy to make them look different. (I’m sticking to one species—sockeye salmon, rather than Atlantic & sockeye, etc—because I want zero insinuation that different looking humans are different species). There’s enough variation in them to get across that these are individuals.
As well, at this point there are many different directions I can take this metaphor to—using lights, different materials, etc., and I wonder if I should incorporate them all in some way and present them as options, or stick to one thing and hope they really like it.
