140x109x3.5cm
The work will be in the Omnipotence of Dreams exhibiting at Salford Museum and Gallery 17 October 2024-23 February 2025 brings Surrealist works out of Salford’s collections and presents them alongside direct contemporary responses.
Elizabeth Frink’s bird loomed most evocative to respond to for me because visually it is situated just on the edge of the real and believable for me yet it is very stark and abstract at the same time. I was just looking at the birds in manuscripts with a medievalist historian, and the phoenix bird came up – its cycle of burning to cinders then rebirthing again in all its glory and adornment appeared as if at the opposite end of this death-rebirth cycle I saw in Frink’s Harbinger Bird. Today’s intensified threats of nuclear disaster in the media triggered associations with plants and animals flourishing in abundance within the Chernobyl exclusion zone where humans have ceased to shape the landscape. To deal with this, looking back at history to widen the understanding of things felt really important. lThe actual plant standing for phoenix is linked to the myth: the date palm – Phoenix dactylifera – requires fiery temperatures of more than 50°C above ground to bear fruits. Date palm was the keystone species of Middle Eastern and North African civilisation, providing food and shelter for many creatures and people for millennia.