Birds

​An embarrassing, and somewhat predictable, gap since my last post is largely due to my persistent mismanagement of time.  Making artwork always comes before managing my website, but when that has been for almost a year that is quite bad!  Apologies.
 
For the last couple of months, I have been working towards a new collection for the Affordable Art Fair Hampstead Spring edition.  I normally try to tie the collection together in some way.  I don’t want to make work that is all about the same thing or even that uses the same palette, but it helps my head to have a unifying idea…ish. 
 
For a couple of the pieces, I have looked at the feathers of British birds.  This is for several reasons. I am endlessly fascinated with the communities that they build, be as part of a massive murmuration or as a pair or even as individual hunters. The structure of layered and individual feathers is appealing to me. Sincerely wishing to not sound pretentious; the idea of formation, interlocking elements and community is important to me and I always want this to come across in my work.  On a visual level I’m really into how light and shadow alters colours on birds, and I’ve also tried to echo this in my work recently. 
 
One such piece is Jay.  Taking an Eurasian Jay feather as a starting point I’ve examined some of the elements such as stripes, layers, and vivid colour.  The colour is famously vibrant.  It certainly has a more famous and gaudier cousin in the blue jay, but i love the unexpected flash of blue in the Eurasian,

​I altered my usual style of folding to reference a wing tip.  For example, rather than folding half a square up in a blunt line  I’ve more gently pealed up one corner edge  to create a curved  gesture.

 This piece is contracted of several thousands of torn paper elements.  The majority have been hand painted but some are copper leafed.  I cannot tell you the amount of glue that went into this piece, pr how many paper cuts I acquired in it's creation.


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