C Ramsay: Who Is This One? What the Robin Feels

Christine Ramsay: Who Is This One? What the Robin Feels

This proposal addresses four framing themes of Borrowed Time: Species and habitat loss; mass-extinction; anticipatory grief; and art, grief and spiritual practice. It is a hybrid presentation of artwork through academic concepts focusing on “ecological grief.”

“Who Is This One? What the Robin Feels” meets the Anthropocene condition through the figure of the American Robin— Turdus Migratorius—and the concept of “ecological grief.” Although ecological grief is now being widely experienced, as Neville and Cunsolo write, “it often lacks an appropriate avenue” for “expression and healing.” Now more than ever, we must recognize that humans are in continuity with all living beings and that our unchecked hubristic attitudes and extractive activities are bringing devastation and tragic loss to the world and its ecosystems.

I use the archetype of the bird to represent beings as psycho-geological forces. Jung understands the bird as the great symbolic “mediator;” flying about between water, earth and sky; transcending boundaries, such as life and death—a “soul-guide” to the after-world. Drawing actual dead birds is a gesture in visualizing the caretaking role we will increasingly be called upon to play with others—human and animal—in living and dying in the Anthropocene.

My pastel drawings of the robin answer Jon Young’s What the Robin Knows with the question: ‘What might the robin feel?’ What Young has learned in attending intimately to the ecology and “expressive” power of robins is that “[e]very living being has a purpose, a mission, a life strategy, a set of gifts.” Young counters the inevitable charges of anthropomorphism by insisting that we must relegate such scientistic arrogance to the past. His conviction is that “understanding the birds really does help us to understand ourselves and, if we wish, make some changes.” The robin is an archetypal bird and human representations of it span many centuries and cultures. I juxtapose the dead robin, cradled in his bath, with the moon and its gravitational pull on the planet and the heart, connoting the mother, fertility, the mystery of origins, inner knowledge, and the cyclical phases of our existence on earth. Controlling the tides, the rains and the seasons, the moon’s waxing and waning symbolizes being born, developing, maturing in the fullness of one’s allotted time, and declining into sleep, death, re-birth, the unknown. When it’s full it also brightly illuminates for Earth the middle ground between the light of day and the dark of night.

As birds of all kinds, including the robin, are increasingly threatened by environmental degradation that pushes them toward the precipice, my drawings in “Who Is This One” offer their lives, and deaths, for contemplation.