The intention for ‘Les yeux de l’oiseau’ (The eyes of the bird) was for the process of drawing to become mental floss for the subconscious mind.

Like the yogic cleansing technique Vastra Dhauti, which involves swallowing a length of cloth into the stomach and drawing it out again to cleanse the body of toxins, this was a methodical delving into the brain’s hidden spaces and the dragging out of data onto the surface of the paper; therefore making some sense of the accumulated clutter stored in the vast stratum of the unconscious.

Each drawing is begun with no aforethought, the pen moves across the paper and imagery materialises. In this way the process is similar to the automatism pioneered by André Masson and André Breton in the 1920’s during the Surrealist movement. In automatic drawing, the hand is allowed to move ‘randomly’ across the paper therefore freeing the marks of rational control. Masson, however, admitted that automatic unconscious purity was unattainable and his imagery actually involved a cross-hatching of unconscious and conscious input. By the same token these drawings reflect the difficulty of relinquishing conscious control, in that many are developed from representational forms which suggest themselves in the marks.

The title ‘Les yeux de l’oiseau’ alludes to the notion of recording fleeting or random impressions and the witnessing of ephemeral imagery from a distance - as though seen through the eyes of a bird in flight, the drawings are secret snapshots of an unseen world.