This show takes its inspiration from medieval paintings and drawings of animals — creatures described to artists who had never actually seen them, or had only glimpsed them briefly. The results are charming and often funny; cats and dogs painted with the faces of men, fantastical beasts built entirely from imagination and second-hand description. What you get is not the animal itself, but the idea of the animal.
There is something similar in the way children draw. Ask a child to draw a bird and what comes back is rarely an accurate likeness — it is a mental construct, a feeling of what a bird is. That gap between the idea of a thing and the thing itself is something I find myself constantly chasing in my work.
For the Birds sits in that space. These works are made from the perspective of someone with little real experience of birds or nature more broadly — and I think that is more honest than it might sound. Most of my life has been spent in urban environments, where nature arrives filtered through screens and printed photographs. That is genuinely how I know the natural world.
Birds feel like the right subject for this. Even in the city they are impossible to ignore — landing uninvited in our eyeline, calling out from somewhere above us. They are our daily bridge to something wilder, even as that wild world becomes harder to reach. This show sits with the question of what happens when the bridge is all we have left — when our only experience of a creature is the idea of it.