Overlook of Practice

 

This space between two roads was the origin of my coupling with crow. This disregarded space has become a shared place or habitat between the crow and me - it is constantly mired with detritus and forgotten waste, it is regularly scalped of its grass - the birds come in to feast and the grass regrows - but in so doing the grass and space become transposed, inverted, misinterpreted and muddled. It is hemmed in by two roads, one with a steep ascending gradient and one with the opposite, it is a place of both eerie emptiness and vying liveliness of separate scales, it is the para – site, the misunderstood space, the up and down and the realm of Crow. 

 

My writing and artwork are both contextualised here, they constantly return here, as I constantly pass here, it is the place of physical creature crow, feared mythical crow, and mysterious symbolic crow. The Crowly Trinity of Whole Crow stravages and struts here, appearing as Creature, or bin bag, withdrawing, feeding, disintegrating, liminal, abstracted and constantly perceiving. 

 

 

To watch is to be watched by crow, Derrida knew this when he wrote that – in The Animal That Therefore I Am - allowing oneself to be looked at by an animal is to accept the secret in their eyes and furthermore accept “the abyssal limit of the human.” (Derrida 2008 pp.12)

 

Everything I write and create about crow is a mistranslation – but I revel in this. Everything that comes from my human tongue and body is just a little muddled, inverted, translated but really transposed, a little up or a little down, I am forever behind, following crow, and I can never reach the height that crow achieves, but I aspire to. Therefore, in my art I show crow, soaring up, flapping around, flipping and tumbling, hinted at, translated, miscommunicated through bin bags, disregarded, trodden on, ran over, full of dead meat and pickings – moreover I curate for crow, I leave offerings, I collect pieces of debris I think they’d like, I ask you in this gallery space that I create, to look down, get down really look, and then look up, see the spikes on top of the buildings, look up to see my crow who isn’t quite right, because through our eyes we will never know crow fully, as we will never know any animal fully, their lives are a constant flipping of sparse moments of revealment and then withdrawnness again. 

 

 

But this is exactly what is needed to realise ourselves. In the West we are a culture entrenched in downward motions, drilling down, feeling down, looking down, and even when we think we’re up, scrolling up building up, all we’re really doing is digging our heels down further lying down and doom scrolling our way down our death devoted epoch. 

 

Feeling down? Good. Now go down further. Downwards deeper still to level ourselves with everything we have forever thought to be above; paradoxically we need to lower ourselves ontologically to form a solidarity with all other beings/objects/things in and on this hurting rock – because when we have then we can truly begin to look up, chin up, unground, ascend and bridge the gap of up and down, them and us, and just flip out. Awaken to the flux of things, flapping and flying, turbulent times and, of course, spikes can be found up here but by drifting on this uncertainty we now have much broader scope for finding ways through or around the troubles we face.