Murmurations

“Murmuration captures the swooping mass of thousands of starlings as they flock in a fantastic acrobatic mass before roosting. This natural phenomenon is breathtaking to witness and only occurs in the autumn. The massing is believed to be a way to deter predators as well as communicating good feeding areas. Like clouds of smoke, large groups of starlings roll and churn through the dusk, creating ever-changing shapes across the sky. The Murmuration illustrated contains some 3,300 individual starlings, capturing a moment in time that we would not normally be able to appreciate with the naked eye.

The work was created by studying the starlings shapes on the wing. Each individual bird was then printed in greyscale to a metallic finish card. A sense of movement is maintained by the materials and the construction of the piece. The birds are mounted on pins at varying heights off the canvas, giving the piece a depth of field, and the reflective quality of the card allows the birds to have a playful relationship to the ambient light. These pieces have a unique relationship with the environment in which they may be placed, transitioning as the ambient light changes and as the viewer moves. They capture the awe-inspiring scale and movement of one of the greatest visual displays in nature. Its neutral colour palette making it inhabit a rather mysterious, dreamlike world.”