Fish and Chips sees the eponymous ingredients of the traditional food of Britain thrown together in an unlikely setting. Rather than presented as deep fat fryer bedfellows or on the plate of the diner consuming the meal, Shimabuku throws a potato into the sea and allows us to follow its slow descent to the waterbed. Filmed underwater, we see the potato’s encounters with a large, curious fish, whose ignorance as to the poignancy of their encounter engenders both a humorous and meditative visual quality. In equal measure, this is absurd and seductive. With an accompanying soft jazz guitar track, Shimabuku reconsiders the rare possibility of these distinctive ingredients interacting with one another in the murky waters of the ocean. For the artist, the words ‘Fish & Chips’ function like a poem, ‘because there, I see a surrealistic encounter between potato from ground and fish from water’. The film, with its hazy surrealism, gives us space to reflect on the inherent romanticism found within local traditions, grounding us in a less human-centric mindset. These are living organisms, forced into meaning by the demands of human culture, rather than by natural circumstances after all. We might therefore consider that not everything is for our consumption and convenience and that to assume life as such may be quite surreal in itself.