Though an innate fear of heights, or rather, plummeting to earth from a great height will probably stop me ever actually going up in one, they have always mystified me, and i have always thought they are a wonderful form of transport for exploration.
In allowing nature to dictate direction I can't help but see it as very exposed and vulnerable, and strangely organic.
The tale about the storks delivering babies to the door has always seemed interesting, if not mildly annoying in it's bullshit factor; why a bird would carry a baby to a human never made any sense to me as a child.
This idea has been around for a while in my head; large organic balloons netted with sinew and blood vessels, gently carrying, nurturing and sustaining the life of their precious cargo across an unkind landscape.
It became a play on the stork story that, while equally misleading to children on "where babies come from", is closer to the truth, and would be infinitely more mesmerizing.
It was also an opportunity to try something stylistically new (for me) as i couldn't imagine capturing the look i wanted painting the way i normally work, and being invited to submit a work into a show being organised by Fire was the catalyst to attempt it. Thanks go out to Chris Oatley who has offered up a selection of his own photoshop brushes on his website, and it is probably the main reason this work didn't end up being a frustrating churn to complete, if it was actually completed at all.
The show is the official opening of The Copper House Gallery (off Synge Street, Dublin 8), on Tuesday 27th Sptember 2011 at 7.30pm.
