Presented as part of the Whau Arts Festival 2025 A Fishy Parade is a project created by Christina Houghton, Melissa Laing and Juliette Laird. It invites local community to celebrate and advocate for life in the waterways of the Whau by participating in a parade of fish, crustacean, and invertebrate sculptures. Large scale puppets were created by the artists, including orca, dolphin, tuna (eels), stingray and jellyfish.

Participants were supported to make and bring their own marine creatures through a series of workshops teaching people how to make tuna, fish, jellyfish and tunnelling mud crabs from found and waste materials.

The project was inspired by puppet parades around the world like Greg Corbano’s Murmuration project and adapted to the unique context of Tāmaki Makaurau

Supported by Creative Communities and the Whau Local Board.

The collaborators:

Christina Houghton is a performance artist and dance therapist who has led multiple somatic walks over the ten years of the Whau Arts Festival. She uses objects and costuming to enhance her guided experiences with children and adults. She has degrees in zoology, dance and visual arts. https://millicentdiaries.tumblr.com/

Juliette Laird is a sculptor motivated by concerns about the environment and social inequalities, and also a primary school teacher. She is interested in the potential of collaborative art-making to generate ideas and start conversations and is co-organiser of the annual Between Tides event that combines visual art and performance in an intertidal space. https://juliettelaird.wordpress.com https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16eGVp61yd/

Whau Arts Festival 2025 / Whau the People
The Whau Arts festival is a hyper-local annual festival delivered in the Whau Local Board area by Whau the People. It has been running since 2014 and presents a deeply community embedded response to the idea of an arts festival. https://whauthepeople.com/whau-arts-festival-2025/

Music provided by Jeff Henderson, Sean Martin-Buss, Taekyung Seo & Rui Inaba

Festival and parade photos by Rob Linkhorn
Workshop photos by Melissa Laing