Sarah Pitt talks to artist Shelley Castle about working with birds, dead and alive.
Shelley Castle has a bit of a thing about birds. In the splendid isolation of her studio – an octagonal game larder on the privately-owned Flete estate in the South Hams – the artist is undisturbed by people or the noise of traffic. What she can hear, though, is bird song.
“It is thronging with them,” she says. “Birds are the most extraordinary creatures for me, because they can fly and we can’t. I also love their colours.”
The relationship between humans and birds is paradoxical, though. And no one knows this better than Shelley.
For the past few months, as artist in residence at Torquay Museum, she has been sketching its taxidermy collection made by Victorian naturalists who shot and stuffed birds which in those days would have sung from every tree and hedgerow.
Alongside them are the egg collections made painstakingly by the same naturalists, at a time when no one imagined that these feathered creatures would ever be threatened.
No comments:
Post a Comment