Ghost Birds

This body of work is a collection of small sculptures made from plaster, resin and found objects.

I’ve spent a great deal of my life staring at the ground. Almost everywhere I go my natural affinity with tiny detail entertains me. Starting with collecting small objects as a child under the approving gaze of some wonderfully eccentric women, this fascination has never left me.

I love objects linked to people who once lived where I am now, and who touched, loved, discarded or lost them.  I’m fascinated by the echoes of domesticity, by repeated, everyday human activity and by the environments that perpetuate around us as we morph and slide into new generations. Repeating the passing of the plates; the lighting of the pipe; the fumble and the fall; the curse and the sigh. Wether broken or whole, objects can feel like a physical link between my hands and the past hands that have held them.

Within this rural Dorset on repeat, generations have thrown away the shattered clay pipe, the pretty broken cup, the rusted tin; the fragile things easily broken were discarded in the midden and ploughed into the field, which is where I find them as I walk the countryside.

For a long time, I’ve been making things that try to assemble my thoughts and feelings with my collected items.

The Ghost Birds are cast in plaster in moulds taken from Beswick ornaments which were made in Stoke on Trent between the late 1930’s and the turn of the century. These figurines seem synonymous with the grandparents houses of my generation - treasures of the mantlepiece.

Cast into the plaster are my small finds from ground and stream, picked up whilst walking in West Dorset and touched before me by the hands of the people who owned, used, broke and discarded them.

The plaster birds appear as mended clay pipes or plates, as if they were broken, discarded and found. Reassembled they become ghosts of their ancestors and symbols of the perpetuation of birds common to this part of the UK. Echoing the Beswick ‘Garden and British’ collection and the family homes of a 1970’s childhood, they bear the hope that our lives will still be accompanied by their song in another fifty years time.

What I hope these ghost birds give, is the sensation that you are viewing an artifact - one that is at once familiar but also previously hidden.  They remind us of the fragility of life, of our material treasures, and of the natural world.  They invite us to treasure them anew, each itself a time capsule of social archaeology. A ghost of our grandparents’ mantel; a celebration of hands; the people unknown but like us; who loved and let go of these everyday objects just as we all do and will.