MEMENTO MORI

In the past year I have come across various beautiful birds who have departed their feathered costuming. A magpie hit and run found in the street, a perfectly formed finch in a pile of leaves in my garden, a bronze winged pigeon lifeless by a large shop window following its collision, a very young blackbird lying untouched but unalive on the road near my house and a raven found by new friends, also lifeless, on a back country road in all its magnificence. Friends carrying lifeless avian forms they have kept cold until we met each other for the gentle and remorseful hand over. I know there will be more to come. 

And so begins the considered, conscious effort of a new series of images that must include on some ephemeral level the intimacy of these departed flying souls who soar without feathers or wings to assist their soaring. 

My decision to present them on old, beautiful platters somehow formalises the series and the enquiry. 

And so, the photographers dilemma to preserve or to interpret, to capture something in this breathless form of bird that is a reminder of sorts.

Memento mori.

Don’t forget to die.

This has begun to interest me and so I have embarked on a series of images beginning with birds who have passed on dressed in their fine feathers and preserved for a moment or suspended in time on a beautiful, yet static platter. My intention was to photograph the dissolving of these feathered bodies over time as a record of their beauty and of their impermanence.

While I have no clear sense of where my own exploration is ultimately headed, I am lead here by feel. Each of the beautiful birds I am photographing at this stage have died naturally and so in some way this process of capture is an honouring of sorts perhaps even of the mystery of life itself and of the riddle surrounding the question ‘What is Life’?