Flock

Coffee, acrylic on Fabriano paper

37 x 57 cm

2015

The solo show ‘Murmuration’ examines natural systems by mathematically deconstructing the phenomena of murmuration by starlings. The sublimely gracious movement of the group forming, merging, and almost melting away in real time is an incredibly choreographed display; its visual beauty belies its strategic and existential necessity. These tiny birds protect themselves from the prey, forming and moving in unison within seconds, appearing to be larger each day before they rest on trees for the night. No bird collides as they migrate in this mass performance instead swarms in defense, analogous to human beings acting with a hive mind.

I am extremely drawn to this natural occurrence; hence this body of work became trying to understand the flight of these birds with such precision. I started drawing on paper, emulating stains and textures of distant landscapes and began dissecting these movements using Fibonacci sequences, the golden mean, and Euclidean geometry to split them into small fragmented sections creating a systematized dispersion and then painted those fragments to represent each shape as a bird symbolically.