Fighting Fish print collection
£200.00
Giclée print, A4
Hahnemühle Fine Art Pearl paper with border
Edition of 100 per print
Unframed
The Fighting Fish collection is part of a set of three digital prints by Holly Birtles, including Fighting Fish 1, Fighting Fish 2 and Fighting Fish 3.
Bundle of all three Fighting Fish digital prints: £200 + P&P
Associate Patrons: £164 for all three
To celebrate Photoworks Festival 2026, we’re launching a collection of exclusive digital and darkroom prints by festival exhibitor and close collaborator Holly Birtles.
In Fighting Fish, Birtles explores the Thames in London and its estuary in Kent, Essex and Suffolk, where performers and artists reflect on their staged roles as “Thames Monsters.” During a darkroom residency in Chennai, hosted by Chennai Photo Biennale and Photoworks, she focuses on the Adyar and Cooum rivers and finds similar feelings of care, dedication, and destruction. The tension emerges from a feeling of personal reverence for these sacred waters and the harm caused by both human interference and neglect.
The project embraces monstrosity, blending beauty and magnificence with the grotesque, haze, mud, waste, life and death. The idea of “fight” is shown through performative body movements that express an environmental struggle, low oxygen, and rising frustration with government inefficiency over new infrastructure. Birtles combines these staged photoshoots with site-specific documentation and images of species found in the rivers, then uses experimental darkroom processes and Midjourney to blend, multiply and create new life forms. Find out more about Fighting Fish.
About the Artist
Holly Birtles is a UK (London) based photographic artist and educator. Her practice incorporates performance, prop production, and digital/analogue techniques, often in collaboration with writers, visual artists, and musicians. Her work connects performance to place and personal narratives associated with specific eco-systems and geo-traumas. Props and performances respond to natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions; sitters personify specific materials or structures related to the selected sites. Using sound-based performances and tactile props, her works document experiential loss through the photographic image. Recent projects integrate performance and AI into darkroom processes, reflecting on slow violence, environmental crises, myth and sentimentality linked to rivers. Birtles exhibits internationally, often collaborating with artists and writers and is course leader of BA (Hons) Photography at Brighton University.