Broughton Archipelago Series I: 

Introduction (2003 – in progress)

A prime concern of Zeigler over the past several years has been the Broughton Archipelago and issues related to the intense fish farming in this area. The Broughton Archipelago is located off the mainland coast of British Columbia, Canada, across from Telegraph Cove on Northern Vancouver Island. It is made up of a cluster of islands in the vicinity of the Johnstone Strait Whale Sanctuary.

Native wild salmon stocks are of fundamental importance to the ecology and the culture of this region. Although issues related to fish farming are complex and contentious, evidence appears to strongly indicate that, with the introduction of a high concentration of fish farms to the Broughton Archipelago, the dominant native pink salmon stocks in this region are rapidly being decimated. As the young pink salmon smolts begin their journey in the ocean, they migrate past the farms. A large number of sea lice typically affix themselves to the smolts and within a short amount of time kill them. The situation in the remote area of the Broughton Archipelago is critical, as is the survival of native salmon stocks in other regions in BC and in US coastal states that also still have major salmon migrations.

3. Fish Farm Net Pens, Indian Channel, Broughton Archipelago, BC, 53.3 x 83.8 cm (21 x 23”), archival digital pigment print, 2005-07.

6. The Escape, 83.8 x 112.2 cm (33 x 44.2”), digital archival pigment print, 2004-08.

4. Netted Fish Pen, Broughton Archipelago, BC, 101.6 x 121.9 cm (44 x 48”), 2005-08.

7. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Vancouver, 73.7 x 106.7 cm (29 x 42”), digital archival pigment print, 2005-07.

13. The infants, close up of the infant, 111.8 x203.2 cm (44 x80”).

2. Boat Wake, Broughton Archipelago, BC, 80.8 x 116.3 cm (31.8 x 45.8”), digital archival pigment print, 2003 -7.

From a distance the vistas in the Broughton Archipelago are awe-inspiring. Dwarfed by the mountains and vast sea, the open-net cage Atlantic salmon fish farms and logging operations along the Pacific Ocean coastline seem hardly noticeable. The land of this--until recently--pristine wilderness area, inhabited by First Nations Peoples for thousands of years and logged and fished extensively by settlers throughout the 20th century, now in the 21st century struggles to maintain the balance of its increasingly fragile ecological systems.

Boating alongside one of the fish farms in the Broughton, it seems unimaginable that just one of its many cages can contain from approximately 30,000 to 100,000 Atlantic salmon. With the majority of fish farms Norwegian owned, one farm often contains over a million Atlantic salmon. With the environmental damage being perpetrated concealed even at a close range, the beauty of this “wilderness landscape” evokes the terror of the sublime. From afar, in the minds of those who live in the Vancouver area, or in Ottawa, the nation's capital in Ontario, or abroad, remote areas such as this still define “Beautiful British Columbia,” and the devastation remains hidden.

From the hundreds of digital images Zeigler has taken on several journeys around this region by boat since 2003, she has completed approximately 30 to 35 works that she developed using PhotoShop and printed on large-format printers with archival inks.

The Infants, one of the works featured on this site, includes seven large images of pink salmon smolts from the Broughton Archipelago located in British Columbia, and one image of a child. The pink salmon smolts (i.e., baby salmon that are in reality approximately 2 1/2” [6.35 cm] in length), were obtained from this region from scientists, scanned by Zeigler and then further developed in Photoshop. Each smolt is enlarged to the approximate size of an adult human, on sheets of paper that are 44” x80” (111.8 x 203.2 cm). The large picture of a child, Zeigler's son who is now a young adult and gave permission to use this image, is included as an additional point of reflection, and to indicate that the fish being viewed also are infants. Installed this work has a total length of 35.5 feet (1082 cm).

Allowing for reflection on how scientific information is often manipulated for political, social, and economic ends, The Infants serves to critique the authority of science, and the way in which particular social and scientific experiments, as well as images, reinforce or challenge our ideas about nature and human-animal relationships. The large-scale of these images--their display, the background colors employed, and the floating quality of the smolts--take the works out of the realm of the purely scientific that, through the subtle curve of the Petri dish used in the process of scanning the fish, is alluded to in the corners of selected images.