§ So this was a commission right?

- Yeah- it was commissioned by Sarah Glennie for the Model Niland in Sligo.

§ But this space?

- It was later installed again at the Chisenhale Gallery in London. 

§ Ah, okay! Tell me about the central space….the flights… they're ordinarily done at the Raptor Research Centre for a     paying public aren't they?

- Yeah, as a way of funding their activities.

§ But here… it seems as if even though an audience is anticipated, something is blocked or withheld?

- Well, there are five birds flying here…but the flights are split across four screens, so I suppose that's what you're picking up on…

§ Yes- they move across a screen , from a tree to a perch, but this interruption by black is slightly disorienting or disruptive, so that I find myself having to relocate myself in the space between the screens, on the one hand , while

facing towards a blank space for a split second that may or may not be where the bird will land….

- Ah yeah…I wanted to leave space for maybe something between anxiety and desire…

§ And then there's that hesitation… a hanging on too long, when the bird is called but it doesn't move. It happens with nearly all of them- a slight but definite resistance.

- Yeah, I wanted to let the editing be paced by the birds themselves, that even when they are staged for an audience, performing , they are also to some extent , not entirely tame as it were. Lothar, who runs the centre, tells how some of them were damaged before they got to the centre and even though they're healed they won't attain their full speed again to the point where the can successfully survive for long away from the centre, although every now and again they do take off, because they can… and sometimes, they're simply in the wrong place- the wrong species, and won't be able to survive beyond the centre for long. But something about that registers for me as kindof blind spots in what we see of them- gaps where they might disappear for a fraction of time, before coming back into view

§ On the tree or perch or on the arm of

one of the trainers?

- Yeah… but that slight uncertainty maybe allows a chink of space to become aware of ourselves… our own shadows caught that can be shifted, our own way of negotiating and anticipating the world, even by way of projection….or that we might block something out by approaching it in the wrong way.

§ Something like how we only see what we imagine to be there and the world confirms our own version of it,

catching ourselves in the act of imagining?

- Mmm…maybe…. or maybe that's too strong a way of putting it.

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