dead crows piece

It starts around 3 weeks ago - or a little more maybe. Cycling along the Transpennine Trail somewhere between Altrincham and Lymm in a field of some crop rising from a ditch down the middle I saw three poles. Each was bent under the weight of at least three dead crows hanging from it.

Just checked - it was 4 June, so three weeks ago this coming Saturday.

The image was striking. I've seen crows - as well as moles and other animals regarded as pests by farmers - hanging on fences but never on poles.

It seems to me to be a kind of magical thinking - or at least more to reassure the farmer than for any other purpose. I'd be very surprised if crows or other animals would be put off by that display.

The page above shows my sketch from memory of the poles and crows.

You can read my handwritten notes if you click on the images - and you can decipher my writing. My notes discuss images from my childhood I was reminded of - as well as sketches of those images, another attempt at the poles and crows, and some provisional sketches towards a sculptural piece based on them.

What you can't see are the hours I spent trying to find some evidence to support what I thought I remembered.

What I thought I remembered was something about the hide of a horse being draped over pole sticking out over a forest with the skull of the creature on top of the pole. I believed this happened in Finland. This information - if I remembered it accurately - came from one of a couple of books of mythology and beliefs in Northern/Eastern Europe and North America.

The closest I could find was an account of bears being eaten, the bones buried, and the head/skull placed on a tree or large high rock to allow the bear's spirit to ascend and then be reincorporated into the forest.

The sketches really didn't help all that much in planning how to approach this subject sculpturally. Really I already know that if I'm making something sculptural it's not until I start making a physical object that my ideas solidify. It's the same with performance - I need to start moving to begin to see what works, and how things should fit together.

But a little outside push doesn't harm. I'd been prevaricating for a while - thinking that I might use bin bags for the piece but never developing beyond that. Then last night I saw a video on YouTube of a performance by Olivier de Sagazan. I really like the piece - but what I took away from it in connection with the crows was simplicity. There are very minimal, very simple materials being used very inventively.

I was dancing round the studio listening to Bob Dylan (ok, and singing along) picking up materials and putting them down. I was thinking how I might make shapes similar to the crows - at least suggestive of something that had been alive - and which actually possesses a physical bulk.

From apparently nowhere it occurred to me that if I partly crushed a plastic water bottle, cut it open lengthways from below the neck to the base, then opened it out I'd have a good basic shape.

I did that to the two bottles I had and it worked. The next step was to work out how to make them look less like bottles. I could paint them black but I would have had to wait until I'd bought paint.

Perhaps I could glue part of a bin bag to each bottle?

I tore open a bin bag and cut it in sections. I glued one section over each bottle - taking the cap/neck as the 'head' where it's most closely fixed - gradually getting freer as the bottle gets wider.

I was pretty happy with the result - and using the one short length of garden cane I had hung the two shapes from it. They're secured by wire pushed through the plastic and fixed in a loop.

Since I was out of bottles, didn't have a lot of bin bags left, hadn't eaten, and planned to ring my mother I ran around the space climbing on chairs to take the photos here just to check the forms did work.

I'm pretty content that they do. Where I go from here I've not a fucking clue. I'll make more -but I'm not certain how many - or how I'll present them.