The getting of language

This is a plate design I did for year 11 art class, It's about the learning of language, specifically the learning of the danish language. Normally the symbols I use are very abstract but in this work we were forced to be very symbolic. The fish represent the getting of knowledge, they are koi carps, because I read somewhere that they live to be 150 years old and are very intelligent. The black voids represent nothingness, so the fish metamorphosing from the voids represents how language develops in your mind when you are in a foreign country, when you first arrive it means nothing and then slowly it starts to form meaning.