Swan feathers

In which a book gifted to me for Christmas by my son, gives me an unexpected way to move forward in my making of birds.

I am sure you have had a similar experience ~ you're very sleepy and almost ready to close your eyes, when you spot a book that's been waiting for a while by your bed and think 'Oh I'll just have a look inside...' And then it is a few hours later and you're still reading. Well, in this case I not only found myself awake an hour or two later, I was also crying softly and trying to muffle my sobbing.

It was perhaps an awful mistake to pick up at that late hour the deceptively slender 'The Company of Swans' by Jim Crumley (published in 1977 by The Harvill Press) It had incredible engravings by Harry Brockway which was my first problem really, as I utterly love engravings and most especially engravings of birds. All of them in this book have so much texture and detail, capturing the majestic beauty of the swans, the wild water, the grass and skies they inhabit and even the figure of Crumley looking solid and cumbersome. You may as well have been out by the loch and stroking the swan feathers yourself in real life. They alone are enough to stimulate you back from the edge of sleep and into the full sweeping rush of wanting to make something.

Now pair those images with Crumley's elegant words that simply capture and hold you until you turn to the last page and you cannot help but glide across each paragraph, smooth and silky as the cold wild water. Very quickly you are introduced to a pair of mute swans and their loch, beset with adversity and whom Crumley has watched since the 1950s. The birds struggle to raise even a single cygnet on the isolated flood-prone loch near his home and work. He's despairingly watched one sickly cygnet perish days after taking to the water, and witnessed countless eggs fail to hatch. Finally he is moved to intervene and build them a floating raft, and now you are committed and very fully awake.

Then another pen swan arrives and tilts her feather's at the cob. Oh no, no, no and the tears start to fall!

"Over the weeks that followed the arrival of the third bird, I sat with my back against the familiar dry-stone dyke and watched the old bonds loosen; a pairing of swans at least a dozen years old unravelling as simply as a reef knot. When I walked to the shore nearest to the old reed bed, only the old pen would come to my call."

The cob is away from the nest for longer lengths of time, defending a very large territory and beginning a new swan love affair, and it's at this point that the emotion swells, we squat beside Crumley as he patiently calls the pen over to him, offers her the food she should have been brought by her partner, and she confidingly drifts into sleep safe in his company.

'Is he going to save her?' you desperately ask in the quiet of the night.

"Then, near enough for me to reach out to touch her (a thing I never did, nor ever tried to), she grew still where she sat. Her eye-lids flickered and drooped and finally closed. Very slowly, over several minutes, her neck fell further and further back and down towards her folded wings. Her head tipped slightly forward. For ten minutes, she slept in my shadow."

And in that moment, his 'dispassionate, objective' response as an observer of wildlife is gone and he is aware of one strong emotion toward the pen, 'love; as pure as it was undeniable'.

Deeply, deeply moving and more engaging than a high definition documentary because you are crying for all the swans, the lost cygnets, the eggs and Crumley, who has watched all of this playout for 20 years.

The emotional impact on me of that story of a pair of swans has lasted longer than the tiredness of not sleeping. It actually led to a huger learning moment for me, my own 'maker's-communion' with a swan, as it were.

I gifted myself the time and space to simply concentrate on the process of making fibre feathers, something that had been a frustration before this point when making my bird sculptures. Concentrating on white swan feathers, made in this case from merino wool and wire, and not making for any specific project or intending any particular use, left me free to just play, experiment and make with a wild sense of freedom. I gave myself permission to simply float on the silky surface of creativity, not trying to swim, and let the outcome just be what it will be.

Now I know what that feeling of freedom feels like for me as a maker, you could say I didn't sleep but I did learn to dream.