The Debut Of Musical Scribblefish

The FIRE Lab team was out in force at Swansea University’s Science After Dark festival on October 30th. Virtually the whole of the Uplands area of the city became a night-time science park with a varied mix of exhibitions and performances to engage and entertain. We took over the top floor of The Book Shop bar to debut “Musical Scribblefish”.

It was going to be grubby!!! We ran a length of lining paper along a few tables and put a box of soft oil pastels into the middle. Everyone lined up around the table and grabbed a couple of colours.

Then the music started

We had a funky and eclectic mix of river-related tracks and our new fishy friends started walking around the table making random scribbles with their colours onto the paper. Then the music stopped, grubby hands grabbed new colours and we all started moving and scribbling again when the music restarted. And again. Until the paper was covered with psychedelic patterns.

We brought stencils of local fish with us – trout, salmon, grey mullet and what we call in Wales, Sewin (salmon trout). Everyone grabbed a stencil and chose their favourite bit of the multi-coloured patterned paper and traced around their stencil and cut it out.

And had their own Scribblefish to take home with them. One family group went away with a whole shoal of Scribblefish.

Of course, it wouldn’t be science if we didn’t have an evaluation so we set up a temporary Graffiti Wall along the bar and gave people stars and marker pens – we seem to have a success on our hands.

Thanks for reading! Our next blog post will be from James White! Have a great weekend!