Cradling the Singing Bird (a line borrowed from a Rimbaud poem) is a conversation, exploration and friendship developed through images formulated to generate further thoughts and pictures in the mind.
Nathalie Agussol (Pan & the Dream) and Julie Wolfe are both artists concerned with form and image drawn from nature and the everyday. In a collaboration that brings their separate but aesthetically and thematically linked worlds together, each draws upon previous representations of birds, clouds, shells, fragments of bodies to rethink them through their own gaze.
For Pan, this might mean a cleanly lit black and white photograph of a wig, turned inside out to focus on internal structure rather than the soft, blonde curls it was designed to display. In Wolfe’s hands, this exploration includes carefully rendered gems, made uncanny by rich, watery overlaid colour that drips from apparently solid minerals. Their images collage together varied media, question how we look and what we do and don’t see, to adjust our focus by drawing attention to hidden or overlooked elements. Together, the images they have created for this project delve deeper, to construct pictures of surreal beauty, and a world reimagined through subtle, interconnected layers.
2022, Special edition of 200 copies, 33cm x 43cm, 60 pages, loose bound series of double sided posters.