Crow Daughter

Alongside the pulp paintings at Salford, I have been working on a canvas that I’ve lately come to call ‘Crow daughter’. Inspired by a dream I had several years ago which I recorded in a journal. In the dream, I was taken up by a huge murder of crows that carried me across a kind of surreal, seething landscape where faces surged out of the earth towards me. The feeling accompanying the dream was one of complete protection by the unlikely feathered allies and a new perspective. The end of the dream had a strange announcement that I had seventeen years left.

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Following the Crow Mother portrait based on a childhood memory of Mum nursing a crow when I was younger and releasing it back to the wild, I felt that this was a natural autobiographical development and had the urge to create Crow Daughter as part of this body of work. Where mum protected, nursed and nurtured the crow; this was like a reversal where I was being held, carried, protected by the crows and shown a different dream perspective that seemed to embody the changing landscape and passage of time on Earth.

I struggled with the idea of perspective as I was essentially the experiencer of the dream. I decided to change the perspective to that of standing outside of myself as a viewer to reflect time and distance between me and the dream, to give the viewer more range and opportunity for perception of key elements such as the changing face in the Earth and myself carried by crows across the dream landscape. I had no preconceived idea of how this work would evolve and allowed it to develop intuitively. Having attended life drawing classes at Salford School of Art and Media, during which we explored colour theory and discussed classical techniques with the ‘life painting’ tutor; Chris Clements (as painting has been the focus this semester), technically, I would now describe this as a high key painting.

After a recent visit with my brother to an ancient yew tree in Beltingham, Northumberland. We discussed time, symbolism, death and the idea of life continuing regardless of process, or as part of the process. The images and experience of this great and venerable tree and connection to the moment in time where we contemplated something ancient in a place ( churchyard) that marks the passage of human time and where time seems to stop impacted us both. This idea I used in the tree of teardrops above. In some sense I felt I was creating an essence of time.

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Does time exist? Is time relative? This was becoming a nonlinear work.

Over the period of this book the Yew tree at Beltingham was growing, regardless of the seething changes of humanity. Although in itself finite, it seemed to embody something of the eternal as it was over a thousand years old and stood on hallowed ground. Manuel de Landa in the above philosophical work, recommended by Jake Chapman, states that “technology won’t be viewed as evolving in a straight line.” (p.73,) I felt this related to how I was beginning to view my creative process too. Time was emerging as a theme.