Artist 44: Adelle Caunce

This is an artist that I actually talk with on Facebook and exchange ideas with on occasion. She's from Surry BC, Canada and apparently grew up as a somewhat feral child. She studied Fine Arts and Criminology in college from 92-97. She gets some of her ideas from corny horror and sci-fi movie. She took up traditional animation training at Sheridan College in Ontario from 99-2001. She then moved to San Francisco, California where she studied computer animation, sculpts large fish sculptures, and draws.

Her fish sculptures are made out of recycled newspapers, cloth, and other objects that she stumbles upon. It typically takes her 10-15 hours per foot of length on her sculptures. No two sculptures look alike, as they are all hand made with no use of templates. She hopes to offer an alternative to mounting fish as trophies and keep them living their lives happily in the water.

Adelle currently resides in Texas.

Her fish sculptures are incredibly whimsical and should make anyone who views them laugh at the comical appearance. She uses a lot of texture in her work, making the newspaper and fabric look like somewhat realistic skin and scales. The most common motif in her work are ridiculous teeth in the mouths of the fish. Instead of using the teeth the species she is sculpting actually would have, she exaggerates them or uses completely different ones, like a great white shark with molars and braces.

While I mainly focus on freshwater with my fish sculptures, Caunce typically chooses marine and deep sea fish for her subject matter. She does put a lot of research into the body structure of the particular fish that she is sculpting, which she later abstracts lightly in order to add a more comical look. She hasn't updated her site in a while, so we can only guess what her most recent works are.

Here are some of her wonderful works;

Goblin Shark


Hammerhead Shark


Deep Sea Hatchetfish


Adelle has influenced me to work on a larger scale and depict even more motion in my fish sculptures. Most of her sculptures are over 6 feet long and command every once of attention in the gallery they are being displayed in.

Here's her website if you want to check out more of her amazing work.
http://www.biguglyfishies.com/BUF.html