THE TRUTH ABOUT MY PIGEON: A STORY OF CRUELTY & RESILIENCE
I promised to do a positive blog post this week, so here goes:
The first time I encountered death was at the age of 5. I remember walking back from the park with my family and tripping on the torn and twisted corpse of a pigeon, burst open with its red and purple strewn across the tarmac. It had a snapped beak and crushed head, but its tortured eyes were wide open. I learnt two major life lessons that day;
We all die
No one cares about pigeons
I cried for literally hours. I still remember the runny nose, the heat on my face and the pricking of my tear ducts, accompanied by that pounding headache you get from crying for so long. The more I was told “cheer up, it’s only a pigeon,” the darker the world became. And coming from an atheist background, my family had no means of simply magicking it away with promises of pigeon-heaven and an overarching narrative about the meaning of it all. From that point on I was fascinated with death and I was fascinated with pigeons, foxes and mice - the animal “pests” who have learned to survive alongside human ruthlessness.
Two decades after the park incident I believed myself to be desensitised to animal death, as we are all primed to be. I had internalised the mantra of “let nature take its course, do not interfere, and I extended this outlook to roadkill. I had recently been through a big break-up and for the past several weeks had been living in an artist residency in Incheon, South Korea. I had found myself quite alone in the city. There were two other foreign artists in residence, but both had family ties in the country and were fluent in the language, often busy and rarely around. It was a stroke of bad luck on my part, and as much as I tried to socialise with the Korean artists, my Korean was nowhere near good enough, and many of them felt uncomfortable to speak English with me. So I poured myself into my work and adjusted to the solitude as well as I could for the next three months. Poor, lonely and unsure of my life choices, there were moments when darkness descended, but I tried to punctuate my time with little trips to local restaurants or shops.
One day I left my apartment to pick up some art supplies, and as I passed the car park I turned to see a tiny baby pigeon looking up at me. It was matted with clumps of its own coagulated blood, bleeding from its neck and shivering. It was squeaking and calling up to a nest on the roof, with the mother pigeon taking no notice. “No,” I thought, “let nature take its course. Nothing to do with me.” I walked on and tried to forget about it. Several hours later, I walked back past the car park, and the little baby was still there, looking up at me. I tried to ignore it once more and went into my studio to illustrate my next big piece. But I could see the baby from my window, and it was squeaking longingly up to its mother, who was still taking no notice. I went to shut the window, and to my horror a 4x4 car pulled-in and was reversing directly towards the pigeon. I leapt down the stairs, out of the door and scooped up the chirping baby in my hoodie.
“I’m just going to put you in the park so the cats can end your suffering” I thought. But as soon as I’d placed the pigeon down, a couple of the Korean artists spotted me from their windows and came out to see the bird. They gathered round and discussed what to do. Before long, one of the lovely curators had run out with a box to keep the pigeon in, and before I knew it, the bird was drinking from a cup of water, washing its blood off and hopping about. As the local cats began to circle I was encouraged to take the baby inside. The move was against my better judgement, but I felt like I had been given the blessing of the residency to do so.
Over the next few days I was caught up in conversations about what to do with the little one, how to feed it, where to store it, one of the artists had even decided to make an egg incubator for his next installation piece. I named the pigeon Milton, and together we would rise like Satan from the depths of hell haha. He began to flap his wings and was almost able to fly. I let him out to run around and practise flying, we both looked up to the roof and scowled at his terrible mum as we ran around. I lost sight of him a few times, and to my horror I found little kids running up to him and kicking him hard in the head. One young woman hovered her boot above him and looked set to stamp down and crush his struggling little body. So I took to letting him sit on my shoulder as I walked around town. Local cats stalked after us, waiting for their moment, and a number of people in the street struck up conversations with me - my broken Korean and their broken English somehow working together. In that moment my little Milton made me visible and in return I gave him safety.
Milton was not eating. I asked my Korean friends in Seoul to phone the animal rescue charities to take him away, but they would not accept pigeons and told me that the bird would be immediately put-down. Milton was drinking water, had cleaned himself up and was almost flying. I took him around town and lifted him up and down so that he might spread his wings and fly. He never quite got there, and as days passed I got more and more concerned about his lack of appetite. I searched the internet and bought all manner of food to test with him, but to no avail. And then the fatal blow, I received a message from the building manager telling me that the animal could no longer stay in the studio. I absolutely agreed that this was fair enough, but was utterly conflicted. I panicked. There were no options. He was not yet able to fly, and every time I put him on the floor, some cruel human would kick him or stamp on him. I was thrown into turmoil, and after having rescued this little baby against my better judgement, would now have to send him out to be killed.
Two of the Korean artists came to me and together we walked Milton up to the top of the hill, to a park full of people. Milton flapped around on my shoulder and squeaked to the passers-by. With a heavy heart and tight throat I placed Milton on the path. Not a minute went by before some young girl ran up to clucking Milton and kicked him in the side of the head. The artists held me back, but I pushed through and scooped him back up. I walked around the park for what seemed like hours, although it must have only been minutes. Eventually I placed him down in a bush, but every time I walked away he ran after me, flapping and squeaking. The artists, growing impatient, told me that nature is cruel and to let Milton go. We walked very quickly away down the hill and I tried to ignore the cries behind me.
The artists swiftly disappeared, and that night I ate dinner alone again. I’m not ashamed to say that I cried into my Bibimbap. My stomach felt sick and I struggled to sleep. The next morning I woke up early, deciding I had made a terrible mistake, and I ran back up the hill to see if I could find Milton. And I did. His small body had been stamped into the path and crushed into several pieces along the walkway.
I’m not sure I ever forgave myself for that. It still upsets me now.
To cope with my feelings, I looked through my footage of Milton and illustrated the patterns of the wild, messy feathers about his body with thick black ink. I eventually cut this image from steel and welded it onto a metal plate. If you visit Incheon Art Platform today, Milton is a permanent installation on the roof of the main building, above the car park where I found him. He flanks each side of the pediment holding pumpkins, one full of money and the other full of demons. This follows the ancient Korean story about two brothers who rescue little birds - one who saves his bird and receives a reward, the other who deliberately damages it and receives… demons.
Although this was not exactly the most positive blog subject, I do believe there is a positive take-away. Little Milton fought for his life. Maybe not in an intellectual way, perhaps not in a human way, but even with his little pea brain, he fought and fought and fought. And he almost made it. So in dark moments I think of that resilience, and to my mind that's a positive.
I have made a number of temporary and permanent installations across Europe and South Korea dedicated to those animals who survive in the tiny gaps humans leave between one another. In my most recent artwork, ANGER, the main character is likened to a fox, who must survive like a shadow, skulking between the brutal actions of other humans and carving out his own existence. Orchogany: Eleven Roof Gods Reborn, was the permanent sculpture of Milton in Incheon, which i referred to above, and the subsequent freestanding steel sculptures of him are from the series My Pigeon Milton. In The Birds Who Stayed, I installed two dead starlings on the roof of ZK/U (Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik) in Berlin, as a permanent steel sculpture.
