Brushing up on the beauty of fish art.

Beauty lurks in some strange places, and it just takes the application of a talented artist like Abigail Fallis to winkle it out.

Dead fish and supermarket trolleys proliferate in her surprisingly attractive new exhibition in Newcastle, while a painted bronze portion of fish and chips has pride of place in the window of the Opus Gallery on Shakespeare Street.

The fish and chips on which the stupendous bronze was modelled was actually bought in Abigail's local chippy in Stroud, Gloucestershire.

Fish are a recurring theme in the exhibition. On one wall, for all the world like a fossil in a museum, is a bronze sculpture of a halibut ( or at least part of it. Much of the flesh of the fish was removed before the head, skeleton and fins were cast in bronze, with the fishy bits still inside.

"It's a sarcophagus," explains the London-born artist, as if this were a major selling point.

Actually, it probably is. After having an exhibition in London sponsored last year by Damien Hirst, the art world sat up and took notice. "He said he liked the work I was doing at the time, so I was able to make new pieces," says Abigail. "As a result of that, I was able to invite all sorts of people to come and see the work."

You can understand how the famous creator of a pickled shark would go for Abigail's work, although this might be simplistic thinking.

Her fishy inclinations began in 2002 when she was invited to enter work for an exhibition called Sterling Silver. "They said you could make anything cast in silver, but it had to be no bigger than 5ins in diameter.

"I had always wanted to do a fish skeleton because they are so beautiful."

She chose a very small trout, ate the flesh and coaxed the skeleton into a delicate arc before creating her first sarcophagus, dropping it into silver in what is known as the burn out process. She called it Head Over Heels, and it led her to increasingly challenging encounters with the maritime world.

The halibut fascinated her. "They were revered in medieval times," she says. "Hali means holy, so it should be holybut. The scales are enormous, as I found when I gutted and filleted this one."

Abigail isn't afraid to get her hands dirty, as you might expect of someone who specialised in metalwork at Camberwell College of Art and worked for a blacksmith before deciding she lacked the strength to hump gates around all day. Before picking up her halibut from Loch Fyne in Scotland, she worked there for a month on a fish farm.

"They said I could take as many skeletons as I liked because they do die. If I'd had to go to Billingsgate it would have cost me about pounds 700."

The Opus halibut, a female, is entitled Only Here For The Halibut and it can be yours for pounds 15,000.

The gallery has several examples of her fish pieces, the preserved bones glittering and delicate in their silver coatings. "People like them," she says. "They are selling very well, I think because they are unique and fit easily into a collection."

Priced at pounds 10,500 is In Cod We Trust, a piece which resulted from a mistake. The body of the cod fell apart, but Abigail thought the head was dramatic enough on its own to make an eye-catching piece.

This is not just art for art's sake. It is clear from talking to Abigail that she is also passionate about the ecology of the sea and concerned about what we are doing to it. A cod's head artwork, she suggests, is destined to be a rare thing: "Cod that size are dying out. They're catching codlings now."

She says the curator of the National History Museum has expressed interest in her work.

Supermarket trolleys, made by a firm in the North-East, are also a preoccupation. Commissioned by supermarket chain Somerfield, in a project to aid a muscular dystrophy charity, she created a series of sculptures using trolleys stacked up in a spiral like DNA.

The one in Newcastle, called Blueprint DNA, features the little trolley models which she says every professional trolley-maker has to master before they are let loose on the full-sized article.

Downstairs is the biggest piece, The Fast Supper. It consists of large papier mechA hands representing the hands of the disciples at the Last Supper, except instead of bread and beakers of wine they are clutching the products of the fast food era ( burgers and the like. "My favourite character is McJudas," says Abigail, but perhaps we'd better not go there.

The most expensive portion of fish and chips currently on offer in Newcastle ( at pounds 5,800 ( is called De Profundis: From the Depths and it rests on a plinth of Formica, made in Newcastle. Since we will definitely be hearing more of Abigail Fallis, it could represent a bargain.

David Whetstone