Migrating Murmuration, 2020, Nicola Anthony
You could say I've been working the wrong way round with my 'birds with words instead of wings' - I started with large steel large birds in a 15m high public sculpture, and now a series of mini paper birds have taken flight - which started when people kept asking me if they could "take just one bird home".
I am so happy to announce that the piece pictured, Migrating Murmuration (2020), was selected by art critic Tabish Khan for his curated selection of the ING Discerning Eye Exhibition.
The exhibition opened publicly last night and the piece was sold even before it opened at the collectors preview. If you would like to take home one or two of these birds for yourself I have created 5 limited editions over in my Atelier Shop. Learn more about the meaning behind Migrating Murmuration below.
About the artwork
This artwork looks at the shared experience of migration on different sides of the world. The words cut into the birds wings are from poetry written in gaelic language, describing the country of Ireland which has experienced tumultuous migration in it’s own history, and is now seeing tables turned at a time when Europe is faced with unprecedented levels of immigration - when more than 79 million people around the globe are displaced.
The bird forms are based on the starling - a bird resident in western and southern Europe and migrating in the winter to North Africa.
These birds make migration a natural part of their existence, showing us how the local and new populations integrate and exist simultaneously. Meanwhile the words in the poem talk about migrants who have arrived in cities in Ireland and the UK, but not found a place to live or settle into society, standing out in a crowd while a sea of people flow obliviously around them.
The artwork comes out of research around emergent behaviours in humans - the way we all act as a whole in a crowd or a community, knowing instinctively where to step and how to move, similar to a murmuration of starlings. Conversely this series of works has found an interesting irony this year at a time when crowds and gatherings are banned, and passing each other in the street has become an awkward and non-instinctive act of social distancing.
I engaged with a team of linguistic and cultural specialists in Galway University and with the corpus of Irish-language literary texts that speak to the themes of migration, dislocation, culture shock and precarity.
This sculpture tries to impart the universal resonance of migration, and the fact that we have all experienced it at one time or another - it has torn apart or brought together most of our families whether that migration was from town to town, country to country, or across the ocean.
