Matthew Ballantyne | Tantalus
- Matthew Ballantyne
- "Tantalus"
- 2019
- Inkjet photograph in frame
- Ed. 2/5
Tantalus came to be after a friend alerted me to the presence of a female Roufus hummingbird that had struck the window of a bar in West Point Grey. I hopped on transit and hurried to the spot to see if the bird was still there. I found her, wrapped her in tissues, and headed back to my UBC studio. I took photos of the bird and knew its beautiful iridescent colours would inspire some project, though I wasn't sure what. I see hummingbirds in the field frequently, but having this sort of prolonged and direct access is rare. I sat with the shell of this small creature for the morning, looking closely at her incredible features now sad and inanimate, just contemplating how to do justice to her beauty while also capturing the profound loss of her death. I had kept a Robert Creeley collected poems on my desk, often cracking it open to stir something creatively or emotionally. I opened the book at random and landed on page 350; it read:
Joy
I could look at
an empty hole for hours
thinking it will
get something in it,
will collect
things. There is
an infinite emptiness
placed there.
I read the poem a few times, letting it absorb slowly. I then looked at the hummingbird, her essence now evacuated, and felt like this was also a sort of "infinite emptiness." I then glanced at an empty soda bottle atop my desk. The bottle's mouth seemed now to demand to be filled–– one infinite emptiness replaced by another. I picked the bird up and placed her into the bottle top. I sensed something was happening and I followed the logic. What was missing was the drink. I ran down to the corner store near my studio and found a bright-orange mandarin Jarritos soda, a favourite of mine, imported from Mexico. The orange of the drink matched perfectly with the orange rufous plumage of the bird. It is important to note that hummingbird's feathers are mostly green and grey and largely unpigmented. Still, because of the intricate layering of dense but delicate fractal patterns, the ways light waves interact with the "lattice" of their feathers produce the vibrant, shimmering iridescent tones. The sunlight pouring into my studio at that moment was excellent, and adjusting the bottle at just the right angle brought out the vibrant shimmering greens, yellows and oranges.
Shortly after shooting photographs of the bottle and bird, I had a studio visit with my graduate advisor. We talked about the accidental associations and iconographies of the image; she had mentioned how the bird had become an inadvertent Tantalus stand-in––a character from Greek mythology who was a mortal son of Zeus. Tantalus had stolen nectar from the table of the gods and distributed it to other humans. When discovered, he was punished by being placed in a pond for eternity. Each time he tried to lower himself to drink, the pond would drop just out of reach, and each time he would stretch for the fruit above him, swaying from trees at the pond's edge, the fruit would dance, ungraspable, forever out of reach. The punishment was a lesson not to blur lines between the world of mortals and gods. One of the details of the image that especially lends itself to the idea of the "tantalizing" is the bird's tongue, which has been forced out of the beak due to the trauma of the window strike and is dangling in the ullage, just shy of the liquid, implying the desire for the nectar was her undoing. I was also interested in the sad feature that, though this was an artificial tableau, the scene it suggests is not impossible. Hummingbirds are attracted by colour rather than scent. There is a distinct possibility of human refuse presenting dangerous, trap-like conditions. Hummingbirds regularly become stuck by the beak in backyard feeders or other human-made objects. The impact of human intervention on avian-life is tragic and ever-present, and much of my work attempts to present these uneasy dynamics.