See Jane Draw by Xero Corp
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and
caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny
snake,
In the caldron boil
and bake;
Eye of newt and toe
of frog,
Wool of bat and
tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and
blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and
howlet's wing,
For a charm of
powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth
boil and bubble.
Drawing in
the big book of birds.
See Jane
draw.
I'm a sweet
little bird in a gilded cage, Tweety's my name and I don't know my age.
Jane stop
this crazy thing!
See
Jane drawing in the air. Jane Air.
Born from an egg,
reared in a nest, fly off into the world.
Above
and away from the discomforts of human life.
Or maybe trapped and caught and caged.
What is a caged bird?
What is a bird?
cannot fly in a cage.
Just a creature.
Pelicans, thought Medieval
Christians, were self-sacrificing like Christ. In their nest, with their large
beak they would pierce their own breast to feed their young with their own
blood.
And the Phoenix is of course the
most famous mythical bird. Resurrecting like Christ, it dies in fire and is
reborn from the ashes. Its nest is a funeral pyre. A funeral pyre as attire. A
cocoon or chrysalis? Or just a coffin.
And so we build empty nests for our
own selves and secretly hope that we are Phoenices and not just dying factory
farm chickens. Will we ever know if we are and have been just sad grey humans
and not shining gods in shamanic abjection?
The colour is high volume childlike
joyful; the forms uncomfortable bodily but writhing or transforming. Covered in
feathers fur quills or prickly spikes, the body threatens and repels.
Engaging with them is like having
eaten too much fairy floss and wanting to get off a merry-go-round that won't
stop. The lurid prickly self-portraits suggest that the bird drawings are not
ornithological documentation, but goofy symbolic. Eagle chicken turkey phoenix.
Considerations of birdness.
Our ordered and regimented social
and economic system does not provide much room for madness and visionary myth,
for magic and shamanism. And so we draw a circle in the sand and say here is my
magic space. My funereal cauldron is my nest and here is a bowl of soup.
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