About the Artwork
These sculptures are a celebration of the opportunistic and brazen gulls that are everywhere: strutting along Worcester High Street, perching on rooftops, swooping over the river.
The collective feeling towards gulls tends to be negative - I would like to interrupt the narrative that gulls are a nuisance, and instead steer our thoughts to their admirable traits.
Questions to ask:
- Why do we have so many gulls in the first place? Is it linked to the amount of food we throw away?
- Why might gulls sometimes behave aggressively? Are they just being good, protective parents?
- How do we, as humans, connect with our natural world?
The Materials:
The materials of my sculptures are all salvaged, diverted from landfill (old wire, hose, fruit nets, plastic strips from Kallaways, etc), woven together to create form. Therefore, the sculptures are a reminder of the amount of waste we generate. The woven materials are a symbol of our human interconnectedness with the natural world, our web of being, that we, as humans, are unravelling.
The Plinth:
I have long admired how the Plinth enables art to be outside of a gallery space and into a public arena for all to enjoy; I wanted to be a part of this new project that moves around - it feels very innovative.
Also, I love the vast scale needed for this project - my birds so far have been life-size (or thereabouts), and scaling up my sculptures to meet the requirements of the plinth has been an exciting challenge.
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