I learned how to be a Crow and a Pigeon
Liadin Cooke 2022

I learned how to be a Crow and a Pigeon visualises places walked that changed the way we exist and related to people during the period of the first Covid lockdown.

Interiors, away from where we live were dangerous and the outside safe - the opposite of normality. Prior to lockdown most of us walked either as part of a commute or travelled by car to walk for leisure. Told by the government to exercise outdoors, we could only walk near our houses.

On my walks I made a pact with myself - if I saw a lane, path, park, wood or green area I didn’t know I would follow it, keeping off the roads if at all possible. My world exploded, I found myself surrounded by nettles, blackbirds, apple blossom, bees, clover, wild flowers and grasses, ponds, frogs and a myriad of insects. I forgot why I couldn’t go to my usual places, why I was locked in my home. I wondered where other people walked and what their experiences were.

The image woven into the tapestry is made up of different shapes that mirror places walked, each of them a space where birds, trees and other places were encountered. All of them gave purpose in those difficult, puzzling days, and are now part of how we live.

Tapestries woven on Jacquard looms are built up using layers of different coloured threads with a quality that embodies touch - part of their allure. The warp and weft creates optically blended shades that we recognise as fluid single colours - in much the same way that pixels blend within an image, blades of grass become a field, or a person becomes part of a community.

This overlap of the digital and the physical combines the materiality of cloth - so relevant to the region - with the Jacquard loom’s history as the forerunner of today’s computer driven technology that we are so dependent on now. The floating forms within the tapestry, indicators of the worrisome, difficult, and isolated yet united experience of lockdown, are islands to walk in and forget in a different world.