Constant Sounds in Urban Edinburgh
Lawrence Shove: ‘Carrion Crow (Corvus corone) (W1CDR0001425 BD18)’, The British Library Board, audio recording, (1961), Wikimedia Commons
Continuing from the repeated image of the crow in both previous visual ‘sound maps’, I wanted to convey the idea of the constant presence of crows.
Crows are one of the most common birds in the British Isles, particularly increasing in number in urban areas. They are also one of the most common birds in the shared garden of my flat, so I hear and see them everyday.
The idea behind this small mock-up triptych was to simply explore the incessant sound of the crow.
Edward Cawood: ‘continued caw’, mixed-media collage, (2020)
The three colours, blue, grey and yellow, each represent a different weather and time of day. The deep Prussian blue is clear skies in the evening. The grey is the flat, overcast clouds and fog which often hang over Edinburgh. The yellow is the bright warm sun of dawn.
The white line which cuts across each colour is a representation of the clouds and sky. The ‘caw’, cut from newspaper headings, sits above this line, symbolising flight.
They have intentionally been ordered with the evening first to suggest the continuation and cyclicality of time, rather than just a single day when all one can hear is crows cawing.
This triptych is just a simple mock-up and ideally, I would like each of these pieces to be much bigger – approximately A0 (841 x 1189 mm) each.
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