I have a specific childhood memory from my first boat trip. I was about six or seven
years old, my parents and I had rowed to a campsite where I helped my dad catch fish for
soup. When the first fish was caught, he held it firmly, unhooked it, pressed it against a rock,
and struck its head with a smaller rock, it stopped moving. I no longer remember how I felt at
that moment, it was a long time ago, but I remember what my dad said: “Don’t worry, fish
don’t feel pain.” And I accepted it, that’s just how it is.
In reality, fish likely do feel pain. A distinction is recognized, though still debated,
between nociception (the sensation of pain) and the experience of pain itself. Research
focuses on differentiating between a fish’s behavioral and reflexive reactions to harmful
stimuli. Fish possess the fundamental neural characteristics required for vertebrates to
perceive pain or experience affective states. However, while mammals and birds possess
the neural architecture necessary for consciousness, fish lack these essential features and
therefore may not feel pain.
Realistically and without speculation, a fish feels or does not feel pain only at the very
moment the stone makes contact with its head. It seems to me that love is much the same.
The first time, you can surrender to a new experience, something outside the ordinary,
without knowing if you will feel pain in the end. It is only when the stone makes contact with
your head that you discover whether, and how intensely, a first love hurts.
This painting installation explores the divide between experienced pain and the self.
Denial of pain and regret, grief, and loss are all places in disconnected pieces of the whole
picture. The inability to look at your own experience of love and loss as a whole. The
landscape depicted is a place from my childhood, a memory of fishing by the river, but it’s
much later, it’s no longer my childhood, it’s no longer summer, and I’m not sure why my
father was so sure that “fish don’t feel pain”.

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