I found this hen pheasant by the side of the road, relatively undamaged. Due to the recent spell of coldish weather, I have been able to spend some time drawing it. It tested my capacity to see what I was looking at. The mere fact of looking and turning away, moving slightly, was enough to lose my point of focus. Added to this, the shape of the bird changed subtly from day to day, feathers shifting slightly, body shape relaxing. I followed the light somewhat unknowingly as it moved during the day, tiny changes in appearance read at times as inaccuracies in the drawing.
Its making has been accompanied by a background presence of artists discovered via links from ‘The Hot Chestnut Man’, Beagles and Ramsay, whose performances include offering for consumption to their audience, fried black pudding made from their own blood.
The feeling that results from exposure to their ideas is that I have leaped off a cliff but failed to fall. I remain suspended with no way back and no apparent downward impetus. It is uncomfortable.
Does the community of artists mirror the wider world, in which opposites and contradictions exist and survive as long as they avoid each other and guard their preconceptions, civilised as long as balances of power are not tested in earnest?
Does my bird refer maybe just a little, and coincidentally, to the times in which we live, as opposites in the wider community increasingly defend their interests?
