Moving from Contemplation to Action: Chicken House Collaborations
I thought I’d write a blog post because I actually have something to talk about.
I get stuck in contemplation mode – I know this about myself. But now I’m making forward movement: I’m focusing on creating an encaustic piece for the December pop up show, and I’m giving myself time to present it in a way that feels complete and resolved.
The image I’m working with is marks made by my chickens on my dusty hen house wall. It’s actually an ancient caravan. When I photograph these marks, I see something that moves me – particularly one image where you can see what’s almost like a wing in flight, or stop-motion wing movement captured in a single frame.
Here’s what matters to me about this work: art is usually seen as this thing that sits in the gallery in bright lights against a stark white wall, made by humans. But actually, here I am saying: this art was a collaboration between my bees, me, and my chickens. They did it by accident, just living their daily lives. And this is important. This is beautiful. Look at how much we miss.
The encaustic process is fundamental to how I think about this work. I use wax because I need to invoke certain qualities in my own thinking. I need to be flexible, moldable, unformable, sensitive and delicate, able to pick up on the subtlety and detail that is usually lost in life. The wax isn’t just a medium – the material properties teach me how to work. I reach that state of flow because I use materials that melt and set. I’m working with my materials, not against them.
What I’m making is an A5 encaustic piece using these chicken feather marks. The marks will be printed on Japanese paper using my newly acquired bargain £75 Epson Surecolour P600 printer, on thin Japanese paper-then embedded in beeswax from my own hives, on a birch board prepared with white encaustic medium.
This week, I’m committing to thorough material testing. I need to see how these pale marks will read through layers of translucent paper and encaustic wax – will they become more ghostly or will they disappear entirely? I’ll be documenting that process and what I learn from actually making rather than just planning.
This blog post is fundamentally about how I move out of contemplation into action. This is my action. I’m taking flight.