About

Claudia Maldonado is a Colombian- Spanish designer and visual artist known for her intricate and large-scale Golden Fish Shoal Tapestries made with up-cycled materials. Based in Scotland, where she lives with her family, she designs and personally assembles each tapestry with great attention to detail.

Her background as a professional scuba diver working underwater for two decades gave her the inspiration. “Since my very first dive, I’ve been fascinated observing the perfection of the fish swimming together as one. I always wanted to represent with my art the harmonious movement of school of fish under the water. The visual swirling that magically traps the sunlight to be reflected on the fish scales is simply amazing”. For many years, Claudia experimented with diverse media painting and drawing the fish shoals looking for the most accurate representation of the dance of fish.

Turning Waste into Art

I believe art impacts our emotions and can move us to value the blue planet we live on. We protect what we care about and we care about what we know and understand. Art can bring the beauty of the underwater world above the surface and into view and can inspire us to protect the ocean.

I hand-make large and intricate tapestries inspired by the beauty of shoals of fish. To make a tapestry I start by collecting used inner tubes at tyre companies that would end up at landfills or worse, in the ocean. I wash the rubber and give it a gold patina. I then draw thousands of small fish before I cut them with scissors one by one. The base of the tapestries is a hand-ripped flax fabric with a layer of paint that serves as background of the shoals. I choose to use flax to give flexibility to the piece allowing it to move when it hangs, offering an ever-changing reflection of light on each fish as it moves. Then, the hundreds and sometimes thousands of fish I pin delicately one by one on the flax creating the swerves and dance of the fish. Once the movement I want to reflect is set, I hand stitch each fish in its position. This “labour of love” as I call it, takes me weeks before I see the work of one tapestry finished.

…”The visual swirling that magically traps the sunlight to be reflected on the fish scales is simply amazing.” Claudia