Techniques of the Bird Observer I, Mutoscope

Rosemarie McGoldrick’s recent sculpture is about looking at nature, the creature as other, in particular birds. The mutoscope shown here is a ‘What the Butler Saw’ machine fashioned from stainless steel, an intervention on a woodland path on the Chiltern Sculpture Trail. You crank the handle and you get a one-minute flicker movie of the raptor the Red Kite in flight against a blue sky. The piece uses no electricity, just the natural light of the day. This bird’s presence in the Oxfordshire sky is an intervention itself – conservationists re-introducing the species after an absence of a century following extinction at man’s hands. In another piece binoculars protrude from a viewing box in a gallery at eye level. If you are brave enough to use the large lens as an eyepiece, you are surprised by a bird’s eye looking intently back at you.


Rosemarie McGoldrick’s painting is a series of black-on-black silhouettes of common London birds, an homage or memorial to nature in the city, creatures in the shadow of climate change and nuclear threat wrought by humanity. The collective effect of these images is like hieroglyphics, a language you reach for in vain, knowing it is gone, long past, a pattern book of shapes disused.


Other works are directly political – a series entitled ‘Hot Spots’ about current wars, countries used as pin cushions and sofas, playing with British politics and violence.


She is currently engaged in producing a short, illustrated book about travelling to the Isle of Mull to see the Sea Eagle, but never actually getting to see it.


TC Stilwell