Cormorants and the Whale

Colin Boyd
Cormorants and the Whale
Foam, PVC, rope, steel, paint
2012

Deep within the cellars of abandoned homes, overgrown lots and museum store rooms reside peculiar objects whose histories are obscured by the passage of time. Bones, journals, machines and other curious artifacts that have been separated from their original purpose and context retain the echoes of their former lives while inviting new narrative possibilities.

Colin Boyd’s sculptures arise from antiquity and allegory; from our fascination with creatures long extinct and the impulse to preserve, recreate and revive them. In Cormorants and the Whale, Boyd poses a fantastical yet naturalistically rendered scenario of nine cormorants holding aloft the skeleton of a blue whale. While recalling the massive dioramas found in natural history museums, there is also the element of storytelling – what has incited this small flock of living birds to carry the remains of a giant beast? We are left to wonder, speculate and suspend our disbelief, just as the cormorants suspend their cumbersome cargo.