A fisherwoman who learned the ways of the sea from her mother, my mother, Evelyn McCleaf, was most content with a fishing pole in hand, wading waist-deep in blue-green water, watching the horizon. To catch, clean, and cook fish on the same day is no easy feat, and it was a ritual that I found both wondrously grotesque and miraculous, a metaphor for the shortness of life and its precarity.

A decade before my mother’s passing, I read William Faulkner’s tragic and poignant novel As I Lay Dying. One passage stood out to me that never left my consciousness: “My mother is a fish.”

Five words printed on a single page, describing a child’s attempt to rationalize his mother’s death, fording a coffin through a flood.

Before she died, my mother’s lungs filled with water. Thunder broke with great rain as she left the earth, before Hurricane Milton made landfall. A year later, following her wishes, I returned her to the Gulf of Mexico.

Like a Fish references a poem written by my mother, found two years after her death—an earthly meditation on her transcendental reincarnation into a fish.

The work re-examines and re-evaluates photographs from a fifteen-year archive of collaboration between me and my mother, each made in South Florida, that reflect on the transient nature of life and the photograph’s inherent ability to crystalize and preserve fragments of time. Additional family photographs dating back to the 1950s, including images of Evelyn Williams (Nonnie), my maternal grandmother, are situated alongside poems from my mother’s archive. Together, the photographs and poems act as connective tissue for three generations of matriarchs, traversing the coastlines of Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida.

Through photographs, time travel is possible, offering referential reminders of what has been, and through poetry, imagining infinite possibilities into what could be.

—Noelle McCleaf

Like a Fish

“she speaks through fish”

we begin
drifting face-to-fin
living swimming
vast oceans
briny oscillating
fresh speeding
cleanly alone
attentive shimmering
wandering schools
defying deathful
predation poetic
a pacing
‘to be
seen
deeply’

she speaks
through
fish

all day
voices green
the backyard
captured
gutted
flaky
folds
eaten
excised
understood
hills of pine
needles
poke
the
air
missing sound
drips slow
slicing
stories mostly
still stirring
in their
own
way

she speaks
through
fish

her
arms collect
the sun
pink
brown tones
every hair moves
with against
white air blur
soft shade skin
sunglasses resting
a sense of nose
navigated
by a rabbit
she waits
twitching a
yellow afterlife
a sleek sister
fish bass grooves
ray-finned flashes
electricity strikes
wise waters

she speaks
through
fish

a cat slinks
in hot Florida
a painted window
bucolic biding
bidding for seagulls
a friend
to rub legs
her hands
locate time
holding impressive
weight absorbing
light decay
gracious gliding
grilling groping
sizzling excitement
an ineffable
edge

she speaks
through
fish

a set of tools
poles hooking
lifeline lures
holding hallowed
hands turning
brave books
fresh food
parsing
on paper
digital folders
filled formulated
unfurling manifestos
of dreams
her daughter
once born
always healing
folding stories
returned postponement
a photographer’s
itinerant hands
finding boxes
envelopes
enters the
light
after
images as if
houses inside
interiority surrounds
outside grasses
thickets of sky flowers
framing familial
matriarchal love
again

she speaks
through
fish

these hands
hold dirty
earth blood guts
orange roe
clear scales
a tidy fillet
collecting relics
back and forth
bones returned
to sand

she speaks
through
fish

we drank
in thermal
waters below
the earth
surface hot
spring minerals
salted lie
in a bath
resting naked
aging wounded
capable bodies
vulnerable flesh
soaking in two
hundred years of
American history
women travelers
bathing relief
on borrowed land
stolen time
usurped wind
relegated ground
dancing in ashes
purple white gold
sashes garnered
far from the desert
sands white
gypsum dust
red rock
rust boulders
petroglyphs dark
snakes sunning
baby tarantula
lizard birds
dried rock river beds
continental drifts divide
thriving teaming
walking paths
to the moon
a strawberry
in swaying skies
dreaming in water
Noelle and Evie
my mother and me
her memory
words of her
images in
color slides
mirrored mothers’ clicks
we capture
the spaces
between trees
and the seasons of
our friends
fold us
into how
we see
the world
my mom
her 70s
her friends
and Evie
1979 the year
I was born click
Noelle in mind
sharing photos
she smiled
through frames
headscarf joy
ceremony hair
seen ageless
youthful lenses
clear eyes

she speaks
through
fish

a body knows
where to swim
float purposefully
the emerald
pelagic pith
sea beyond
green youth
blue horizon
grief absorbing
translucent tears
swooshing cold
dark pain
vivid tales
maneuvering grace
a look beyond
boastful resolve
finite forgiveness
because it
is well with her
wide eye expanse
for becoming
she sees
everything
everywhere
everyone
her
bright
beam
we see
her
lucid
tongue
leaving those
emboldened by
failed fear to
burn away
inherited histories
darting towards hope
friendship and
daughters
our mothers
being seen
not
unseen
our hot
bodies gliding
sweating sacrifices
without provocation
not waiting
for arrivals
undulating
for renewals
only awe
anew
we are
incredible
we leave
no children
nurturing now
the child within
we are
who
our mothers
hoped we
would be
if
we
swim
shoaling
together

she speaks
through
fish

—Felicia E. Gail

Noelle McCleaf is an artist and educator inspired by women’s stories, familial archives, and the southern landscape. Through photography, writing, and collected ephemera, her work seeks to contemplate ancestral and topographical history from a contemporary feminist perspective. McCleaf actively collaborated with her mother, Evelyn, for more than fifteen years until Evelyn’s passing in 2024. Originally from Virginia, Noelle earned her BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design and her MFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She currently works as an exhibiting artist and professor at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida.

Evelyn McCleaf (1949–2024) was an avid reader, writer, storyteller, and naturalist. She earned a BA in English and an MA in American literature from Virginia Tech. For thirty years she worked as a senior copyright specialist for the Library of Congress in Washington DC. McCleaf retired to Florida to be closer to her daughter, Noelle, and live by the ocean. In Florida, Evie tutored English to international students and worked as a professor of language and literature at the State College of Florida. In her free time, she enjoyed volunteering for the Wildlife Center of Venice rehabilitating infant rabbits and squirrels.

Felicia E. Gail is an artist, writer, poet, and curator whose practice engages with photography, installation, performance, and social practice. Her project, Travel Back to Blue (2009–present), investigates memory and place, reimagining residencies as artistic practice intersecting lived experience, archives, mobility, and feminist themes through a southern gothic-imagist lens. Gail holds an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, has taught at ECUAD, Carlow University, and the University of West Florida. She founded Collections Stewardship Southeast and is the public programming and membership manager at Museum of Design Atlanta.

McCleaf and Gail are long-time collaborators. “she speaks through fish” was composed by Gail while on a road trip out west with her own mother in July of 2026. The poem was written in response to the photographs of Like a Fish and the artists’ shared experiences of matrilineal heritage, grief, and renewal. McCleaf and Gail’s previous collaborations include Reverberations, a pop-up exhibition at Slow Exposures: Celebrating Photography of the Rural South in Zebulon, Georgia in 2022 and DocuFlorida II: Projections and Prints, inspired by and exhibited alongside the EPA’s historic Documerica project from the 1970s, at Pensacola Museum of Art/University of West Florida Historic Trust in 2018. Also, Gail served as a guest lecturer for Kindred: Recent Photographs by Noelle McCleaf, an exhibition at Richard and Barbara Basch Gallery at Ringling College of Art and Design in 2018.

© Center for the Study of Southern Culture