2021, ink on paper, 90 x 60cm

On a beautiful sunny early-Spring day I walked the farmland behind Camber Sands in East Sussex. The crack and report of a shotgun lifted and turned my head by instinct, and I saw a bird fall from the sky.

This profoundly sad and surreal sight was one I had never experienced before. To know how a bird or any other natural flying thing moves, well, it fits your psyche it feels so natural and effortless. You know to predict a certain amount of duck and dive, a shear and a veer, and always eventually a landing of some kind. You also know that it will move unpredictably but always beautifully. To witness a bird drop seemingly directly plumb-line to the mud and stubble created a momentary chaos in my brain because of the absolute evidence that something was so wrong. Even a peregrine has a some sort of structure to its stoop.

I experienced a sparrow-hawk gracefully killing something a mere fifteen minutes later on the same stretch of Romney Marsh, but that did not feel jarring at all. It felt necessary: an expression of a form of perfect natural order. The hawk smashed its prey and carried it in a decaying but controlled arc behind a hedge. The shotgun just ended a form of grace, and left only gravity.

In ‘Let go’ I wondered what it would take for age-old entrenched mentalities to change and crack out of a cycle where powerful people make the same mistakes ad nauseam. I imagined a conflagration taking apart a symbolic centre of old power and forcing change. In this work I reflected on the snatched and snuffed beauty. I also double-take at myself and remember that fire, gunfire or managed grouse-moor burning, are the antithesis of what we need to allow in order to save as much of the world as we possibly can, and maintain some beauty.

(The option to pick up in person, for free, comes after you enter your email address at checkout. Until that point you will see the shipping charge)