I am a Senior Research Scientist for the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute and this is one of several pieces made for a project called Wool and Water.

Wool and Water is a data art project that blends fiber art with scientific data to create visual representations of changing water quality conditions in the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain Basin. We began in 2022 in association with the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act. Support from the Lake Champlain Basin Program, the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership and others has enabled us to build an enduring project and to use fiber art to showcase the legacy of protecting clean water in the Lake Champlain Basin and beyond. Pieces here in Ravelry are my own but the project website has additional works made by many others as a part of this collaborative effort.

Fish like walleye (Sander vitreus) are popular with anglers for sport and for eating and fish consumption has numerous health benefits. Unfortunately, this and other species are often the subject of fish consumption advisories due to the accumulation of toxins that can impact human health. This knitted walleye demonstrates the concept of biomagnification, whereby pollutants such as mercury and other heavy metals, PCBs, and pesticides increase in concentration as they move up the food chain, which happens when substances accumulate faster than they can be metabolized or excreted.

I used fingering weight wool, I believe it was Cascade 220, and improvised a walleye based on photos of the fish. I added beads of various types to represent pollutants such as PCBs, heavy metals, etc. I also used plastic beads although microplastics. Though they are not known at this time to bioaccumulate, microplastics have numerous human health consequences as well as impacts on fish and other wildlife that consume them. Inside the walleye is a smaller fish attached with an icord, and inside the smaller fish are a leaf and another small shape meant to represent food sources for the smaller fish (e.g., aquatic macroinvertebrates).

This piece was created in association with a short-term artist residency supported by the Institute for Human Health and the Environment at the University of Rochester in which we used Wool and Water to explore the connections between water and human health.