The Bird Dream

The Bird Dream brings together paintings and photographs made from 2019 to 2025, with its core created during the first pandemic lockdowns. The project was originally titled Chronos, and time remains its structural subject: bodily time, domestic time, suspended time, and the repetition by which one gets through a day. During this period, illness, isolation, bodily change, loss, and mortality became difficult to keep at the edges of consciousness. Rather than narrate those experiences directly, I returned obsessively to circles, peony buds, petals, fissures, wallpaper-like pattern, and still-life objects. Spheres became flowers, cells, bodily forms, cracks, and enclosures; repetition became a way of testing attention, confinement, and the possibility of contentment. Kintsugi-like lines suggested damage that could remain visible without being erased.

The photographs bring domestic time, femininity, celebration, decay, and mortality into the same visual field: compost after a forty-second birthday, a collapsing bouquet, a stiletto covered in wedding-cake icing, and in Family Portrait, a clock amid ghostly traces of a shifting room, created entirely in-camera by moving objects during the exposure. The exhibition considers mental health as lived attention rather than diagnosis: the small practices by which a person tries to remain present and make meaning under prolonged uncertainty. The title comes from a dream of a rainbow-feathered bird. That dream later informed the final painting, Quick, Said the Bird (after T.S. Eliot's Burnt Norton, 2025), now in France and unavailable for exhibition. Its absence suits the project: movement is imagined rather than resolved.