The Harbinger
The Harbinger ©2011 Phillip Nesmith
Last night was the opening of the group exhibition Tribute 1 at Irvine Contemporary in Washington D.C. This show is one of the last two shows (Tribute 2 opens next month) before Irvine leaves it’s 14th street location. I made three new 24″ (the above image is 24×21″) glass plate images for this event, including The Harbinger show above and Das Narrenshiff which I posted a few days ago. These works are a continuation of my Flight Patterns series of 2009. These works contain dark driving forces hidden in the “decorative” compositions, and it is this camouflaging and the simplistic creation method that I enjoy about this work.
The star of this plate is the European Starling, which takes it’s place as the second bird I have used in this cameraless body of work. The starling in Celtic and Welsh mythology is tied to the idea of communication and/or the messenger, which can be clearly seen in the Welsh story of Branwen who trains a starling to speak, and the bird crosses the Irish Sea to deliver a message to her brother. The starling is also known by many in birding circles as the harbinger-of-spring as the birds often arrive shortly before robins, and as the harbinger-of-harbingers in some occult circles. In this work, the bird is used as a symbol of both a messenger as well as a harbinger.
More work of this type can be found in the Flight Patterns gallery of my website.
