PAINTINGS

AVES EX MACHINA
(formerly the Bellwether series)

Translated simply as ‘Birds from the Machine’, Aves ex Machina reimagines the ancient theatrical convention of Deus ex Machina: divine rescue at the last.

In this world, no gods descend to save us. From the wreckage of the machine of human hubris, these unlikely feathered survivors claim their vestigial inheritance from those who once encaged them. 

This series probes human exceptionalism and its blind spots: how the lives we treat as ‘lesser’ become our first witnesses, and perhaps our last custodians.

Rather than cataloguing ecological or social collapse, this work explores the quiet courage that surfaces at its periphery. These delicate creatures stand sentinel at calamity’s edge, embodying the paradox that those with the least to give often sacrifice the most.

Visually and conceptually, there’s a tension between the baroque and the barren that I love. Fragile, feathered bodies in Verne-esque promethean engineering set amidst post-human wasteland. The persistence of a singular life against the monumental scale of ecological failure.

Historically, millions of canaries were sacrificed to warn miners of invisible dangers until 1986. They have long been my primary avatar, a consequence of feeling a deeper kinship with the non-human world. Here, they return not as instruments but as protagonists: a small, vigilant presence guiding us through the diaphanous remains of our myopic dreams.

‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul, 
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard; 
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm. 

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea; 
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

– Emily Dickinson