SMALL BIRD TRAP

"Small Bird Trap (Learning to Sing)"; 2013; wood, crocheted thread, stain; dimensions variable (Special thanks to Irvin and Christina Morey for their support with the work)

"I would contemplate for hours those souls flying or resting in the empyrean or some terrestrial paradise.  Nourishing themselves from the nectar of flowers and giving thanks by beating their wings.  That spectacle brought me a perception of what beatitude could be.  Alas!  I wasn't satisfied with approaching beatitude such as it was offered to me in such a way.  I wanted to appropriate it - a naive gesture to which I devoted any number of hours of my childhood.  Impossible to measure the time dedicated to waiting for a butterfly to appear in the garden, the meadow, the forest.  Nor the patience spent in waiting for it to alight, fly away, return, depart again, and stop finally on a beloved flower where my hand or a net would pluck it.  What the butterfly would give me in happiness would vanish with this gesture, or almost.  No doubt the flight of a butterfly on a window put a little lightness and joy into the house.  But only briefly.  How not to understand that it would truly be generous only when I contemplated only in a space appropriate to its life?  To give thanks for what it let me perceive should have sufficed to perpetuate, indeed amplify, a joy to which capture put to an end." - Luce Irigary  (from "Animal Compassion", in Atterton & Calarco's (Eds.) "Animal Philosophy", 2011, p. 195)

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