But could great white sharks be lurking around Scottish seal colonies on the hunt for prey, in particular the Monach Isles, which is home to the second largest grey seal colony in the world?

I frequently work on things after a collector has them, I recently called a collector who owns a fly painting because I didn’t like the way it looked, so I changed it slightly.’ Suddenly, a large crescent shaped tail flashed only inches before my facemask and a rough object momentarily brushed my belly – a shark! It was a white-tipped reef shark and in an instant several more materialised in this Galapagos lagoon where I had the privilege to snorkel earlier this month. a b c d e f g h i j Vogel, Carol "Swimming with famous dead sharks,2 The New York Times, 1 October 2006. Retrieved 23 February 2007

Sharks in British waters

Kennedy, Maev "Art market a 'cultural obscenity'", The Guardian, 3 June 2004. Retrieved 1 September 2007. Hirst has made other works subsequently which also feature a preserved shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine: The Immortal [10] (a great white shark, 2005), Wrath of God [11] (2005), Death Explained [12] (the shark is split in two, lengthwise, 2007), Death Denied [13] (2008), The Kingdom [14] (2008) and Leviathan (a basking shark, 2010) [1]. In a speech at the Royal Academy in 2004, art critic Robert Hughes used The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living as a prime example of how the international art market at the time was a "cultural obscenity". Without naming the artwork or the artist, he stated that brush marks in the lace collar of a painting by Velázquez could be more radical than a shark "murkily disintegrating in its tank on the other side of the Thames". [23] Most sharks need to swim continuously to receive oxygen through their gill slits to survive, however some species, including whitetips, have muscles that pump water through their gills, enabling them to rest. Sharks in British waters The researchers say the tag showed that after being released, the shark swam more than 100 miles offshore and to depths of greater than 800 feet. “It’s clear she survived and thrived,” says Kochevar, adding that the shark first swam several hundred miles south along the California coast, “then took a hard right and headed offshore for a while, then returned to the coast. … There’s no question that she was hunting and feeding on her own.”

Because the shark was initially preserved poorly, it began to deteriorate, and the surrounding liquid grew murky. Hirst attributed some of the decay to the fact that the Saatchi Gallery had added bleach to the fluid. [8] In 1993 the gallery skinned the shark and stretched its skin over a fiberglass mould, thus transforming the shark from a chemically preserved intact carcass to a taxidermy mount being displayed in fluid. Hirst commented, "It didn't look as frightening ... You could tell it wasn't real. It had no weight." [8]Goldstein, Caroline (13 April 2017). "How Many Animals Have Died for Damien Hirst's Art to Live? We Counted". Artnet News . Retrieved 18 June 2022. Brooks, Richard. "Hirst's shark is sold to America", The Sunday Times, 16 January 2005. Retrieved 14 October 2008.

It is completely isolated from its natural setting. Instead of being in motion, in the water, we see it completely frozen and preserved. For most, it may be the first time we have come so close to a shark, with many of us only seeing them on television or perhaps at an aquarium. Here we have a direct experience of the shark, not filtered through any media. Thus we are forced to consider the shark in a new and different context and re-evaluate how we perceive the animal. In Hirst’s piece, we come face to face with the reality and physicality of this familiar image and are forced to consider it in a new setting.Its technical specifications are: "Tiger shark, glass, steel, 5% formaldehyde solution, 213 × 518 × 213cm." [9]