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Bird.

 

Bird.

Several years ago, I had the following dream: I am working in my studio in the old Arts Mill in Wakefield. The building is now derelict and awaiting renovation, but somehow, I am here. One of the people who helps to run the Arts Mill comes in and says, “Everyone is waiting for you, are you ready to give your talk?” I ask him what he means. He tells me, “You are giving a talk on how your artistic practice is about your relationship with your mother.” I feel panicky, my artistic practice has nothing to do with my relationship with my mother. He tells me that I can postpone the talk until I am properly prepared.

When I wake, I feel unsettled. The dream reminded me of near-death experiences. People are asked to give an account of their life and what they have done with it. In this case I am being asked to give an account of my artistic practice. I wonder if art and life are the same thing. I spend a lot of time ruminating.

Does my artistic practice have anything to do with my relationship with my mother? I cannot see how, but there must be some grain of truth to my dream. I get the strange feeling that I have been given more time to prepare my account. It is only later that it dawns on me that my artistic practice is not about my relationship with my actual Mother, but the mother of everything that exists.

In my mind, she is an ancient bird, almost reptilian and older than the hills. She was there long before anything else came into existence. Birds are descended from the dinosaurs. They are prehistoric throwbacks. That may be the reason for this mental association. There is also a biblical association that Yehuda Liebes mentions. He observes that in the biblical creation story some scholars have,

‘… derived the word merahefet [hovered] in the verse “and a wind from God hovered over the surface of the water” (Genesis 1:2), from a root meaning “to brood,” according to its meaning in Syrian and in Deuteronomy 32:11…’

Yehuda Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth and Messianism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 79.

In Aristophanes The Birds creation occurs when sable-plumed Night lays an egg in darkness.

‘There was Chaos at first, and Darkness, and Night,

and Tartarus vasty and dismal,

But the Earth was not there, nor the Sky, nor the Air,

till at length in the bosom abysmal

Of Darkness an egg, from the whirlwind conceived,

was laid by the sable-plumed Night.

And out of that egg, as the Seasons revolved,

sprang Love, the entrancing, the bright…’

 

Aristophanes, L 488 Loeb Classical Library: Aristophanes II Peace Birds Frogs, trans. Benjamin Bickley Rogers (London: William Heinemann Ltd, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927), 199.

 

I wonder if the recurring visual motifs that haunt my artistic practice (birds, eggs, trees and bones) are aspects of a mother archetype. The mother of everything that exists is an ancient bird, from her egg life grows in branching patterns resembling trees. That which is left at the end of the process are bones.

I have always suffered from a strange distress at being in the world. The thing I do not understand is life. I would describe my artworks as free floating vanitas still life, the subject being the transience of life. I think the dream was prompting me to examine my relationship with life and the mother of everything that exists. 

Bird: Wisdom.

I have always associated long beaked birds with wisdom. This association may have developed after drawing a picture of two long beaked birds I saw in a patch of peeling paint. To me, these two birds were wise beings deep in conversation. Thoth, the Egyptian God of wisdom, was also depicted with the head of an Ibis, a long beaked bird.


I did a painting of these two birds and my friend who is a psychotherapist asked if she could have the painting. The painting hung in the room where she did her psychotherapy sessions. She later told me that it bought stuff up for people.

Bringing stuff up, evoking something, is an interesting notion. I have always wondered what stuff that image evoked. I work with certain images, re-translating them into different artworks because they evoke something for me. That is true for an image of a Sunbird specimen. This image has appeared in many different artworks in different media. Again, I associate the image with wisdom.

Wisdom, according to Ecclesiasticus, existed long before anything else came into existence.

‘Wisdom hath been created before all things,

And the understanding of prudence from everlasting.

The word of God most high is the fountain of wisdom;

And her ways are everlasting commandments.’

Ecclesiasticus Ch 1, Ver 1-7, 21-25.

 

Bird: Silent Flight.


Throstle Nest.


Old hands

Shell peas in the kitchen.

Keen sight sees,

The crossings

Of the cold tile floor.

Fear sleeps at night

Beneath eiderdown green.

 

Silent flight returns,

At dog announced cold dawn,

Before warmth blooms,

In empty rooms.

Verdant green shoots,

From dog bone and ash.

Time woven nest of ages.

 

Whist out walking along the remnants of the old Barnsley Canal, I noticed movement in my peripheral vision. As I turned my head, I caught sight of an owl taking flight. This flight was utterly silent; no rusting of the bushes, no sound of wings beating, just a ghostly apparition gliding away. 

This night birds silent flight, even in daylight, awakened something in me. A memory of the 450-year-old farmhouse where my Grandparents used to live. I had the feeling that at night, something flew from that house and went hunting. Its eerie calls could be heard outside in the darkness. It returned at dawn, when warmth returned to its cold rooms. At night that house scared me because all presence left it. A desolate chill crept through the house. I looked forwards to dawn, announced by the dog barking. By day it was a warm, down lined nest.

That night I dreamt I was in the cellar of the house. Something was emanating from the stones the house was built from. I wanted to warn the present owners that this house was not what they thought it was. The stones were living stones. They would infect anything they encountered. Perhaps I have been infected by the archaic stone blocks the house is made from. In dreams the house develops different layers and strata.

The strange relationship between the past, present and future initially dawned on me whilst standing in the barn of the house. The house was reputedly haunted. A member of the Home Guard, occupying the house during the war, left the record of a haunting. The record was left in a school exercise book. It described how a woman, partially submerged below floor level, repeatedly tried to pull the blankets from his bed. It was as though she existed on a layer below the present. I remember standing in the barn where the soldier had slept, staring at the flag stones, sensing the strata of time sedimented below. Despite this, the house felt like home to anyone who visited. It exerted a strange fascination. It was as though the house was woven of time itself.

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