Matthew Ballantyne
b. 1984
Matthew Ballantyne is an artist, poet and lapsed ironist. His work is preoccupied with birds despite their disinterest in him. His bird-focused works - from photographs to taxidermy, haiku emblazoned on flags to pieces made using found materials - reveal a search for empathy in an enchanted but tragic world.
Ballantyne's bird art releases his subjects from their standard frames, their "cages". His pieces call our attention to our anthropocentric presumption and ignorance, and the upshot is a surprising kindness toward his winged subjects.
He is an artist-naturalist hybrid. The artist and the birdwatcher share much in common. They observe and record. They are patient and persevering, expending long hours in wait. This is a passionate, personal search. Birds can become, as Ballantyne puts it, "poetic and haunting obsessions." Catching sight of a bird and adding it to one's life list is not the end of the story for him. He probes the ecology, natural history, and cultural situation, spotting unexpected linkages between avian and human domains.
His study elevates birds to a place in our consciousness that's greater than fluttering, chirping adornments of nature - and more than "merely ornamental objects for humans to exploit," as the artist notes. Like the birdwatcher, the artist has the capacity to see birds as feeling creatures with lives unto themselves, worthy of sustained attention. Birds may thrive for a season but the suffer, oftentimes by the hand of human negligence or cruelty. These artworks transcribe the artist's experience of seeing birds, both the quick and the dead, in urban and rural spaces, through history and culture, in image and metaphor.
"A man," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects." Emerson's dictum holds not only for inanimate things, but also for the way we observe the living. The birdwatcher's neck tilts and bends to glimpse an elusive bird. Ballantyne's angle on birds points us to the possibility of compassionate inquiry into other lives. And not just the lives of birds, but all creatures beneath the skies.
Ballantyne's bird art releases his subjects from their standard frames, their "cages". His pieces call our attention to our anthropocentric presumption and ignorance, and the upshot is a surprising kindness toward his winged subjects.
He is an artist-naturalist hybrid. The artist and the birdwatcher share much in common. They observe and record. They are patient and persevering, expending long hours in wait. This is a passionate, personal search. Birds can become, as Ballantyne puts it, "poetic and haunting obsessions." Catching sight of a bird and adding it to one's life list is not the end of the story for him. He probes the ecology, natural history, and cultural situation, spotting unexpected linkages between avian and human domains.
His study elevates birds to a place in our consciousness that's greater than fluttering, chirping adornments of nature - and more than "merely ornamental objects for humans to exploit," as the artist notes. Like the birdwatcher, the artist has the capacity to see birds as feeling creatures with lives unto themselves, worthy of sustained attention. Birds may thrive for a season but the suffer, oftentimes by the hand of human negligence or cruelty. These artworks transcribe the artist's experience of seeing birds, both the quick and the dead, in urban and rural spaces, through history and culture, in image and metaphor.
"A man," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects." Emerson's dictum holds not only for inanimate things, but also for the way we observe the living. The birdwatcher's neck tilts and bends to glimpse an elusive bird. Ballantyne's angle on birds points us to the possibility of compassionate inquiry into other lives. And not just the lives of birds, but all creatures beneath the skies.
