The inspiration for this piece is a little hard to explain. In my mind there is an echo of Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” but also a phrase from Aberjhani’s “River of Winged Dreams”

“A bridge of silver wings stretches from the dead ashes of unforgiving nightmare to the jewelled vision of a life starting anew.”

As I worked I was struck by the way that flame shapes so easily translated into feathers

This is a far more ambitious version of the fish mobile celebrating Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem than I have made before. It has echoes for me of Escher’s metamorphoses. I’ve made the birds loosely based on the finches he refers to. Like the other fish mobiles it undulates gently even in slight air currents.

Glory be to God for dappled things – 
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 
                                Praise him.

THE THOUGHT-FOX

This is my third mobile inspired by Ted Hughes’s poem. In the poem the fox is also a thought, an idea, an almost-poem. I wanted to make a mobile in which sometimes you could see a fox and sometimes it would seem hardly to be there.

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

You can read the whole poem here