David Bierk

David Bierk's Lost Paradise of Art and nature

LOCKED IN MIGRATION

"...a beautiful rainbow trout
silver from the lake
dangling on a fish hook
midway through a colour change
locked in migration..."

From "Locked in Migration" by Dennis Tourbin, 1973-74

The inspiration for my current body of work is a series of poems entitled "Locked in Migration" by Dennis Tourbin. Tourbin, who is also a painter, performer and, as it happens, my best friend, describes in the excerpt above both the literal and symbolic idea of locked migration - as human intervention arresting a natural migratory process and as a precarious and pivotal moment on a journey through time and memory.

My new paintings were based increasingly on the use of steel "surronds" encasing the imagery, as in "Locked in Migration, No.6". Tourbin's phrase became an appropriate expression of the conceptual basis of this work. These romantic landscapes and still-lifes, embedded in slabs of metal or simulated metal, had achieved a new juxtaposition of form and content and had become an exciting parallel to Tourbin's poem.

I have always been drawn to the virtue, purity and heroic qualities of art of the past. Finding these qualities scarce in contemporary life, I use historical imagery to reflect on our present-day relationship to art and nature and our alienation from beauty and nature in art and life. The notion of memory, of loss and retrieval are predominant.

And so to enclose these relics of the past within a man-made material, to lock them in their own migration so to speak, is an act of preservation in the face of encroaching destruction. The steel imprisons these symbols of nature and confines this natural environment. It impedes our ability to find harmony within that environment and ultimately within ourselves. Paradoxically it creats a sanctuary, freezing in time and forever that moment of beauty, that object, that vista.

This conflict between preservation and destruction, life and death, past and present, the temporal and the eternal, is a common theme in my paintings. It is, I think, my own search for a balance, a longing for an ideal and a refusal of a reality, a recognition of the forces which simultaneously illumanate and extinguish. It is ultimately, I hope, a passionate and optimistic expression of my belief that, just as the poet's words and imagery articulate a delicate fulcrum, through my paintings a similar balance is attainable.

David Bierk

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