Crowbird Flies Again

I was lucky enough to have selected pieces from the Crowbird project appearing in a virtual show at the Burnett Gallery in Amherst, MA this spring, alongside the stunning work of fellow Valley artist May Emery. While the larger project is an arts-based inquiry into the lives of children and their families during COVID, the pieces I included here are specifically about women and their children encountering intimate partner violence during the pandemic. In these analyses I focus on the drama of destruction and repair, and most of all the redemptive circuitry of love.

The songbirds, crows, and cowbirds that make up the majority of the images in Crowbird are metaphors for the clever resiliencies of vulnerable people. All of the images in Crowbird are created as old fashioned pen and ink drawings, and are then scanned, enlarged, and run as large full color prints. These prints are then torn into small pieces and painstakingly reassembled using a variety of repair techniques. If you look closely you can see the seams.

You can see the little show until the end of May 2023 here: https://www.joneslibrary.org/virtualburnett