a blizzard in slow motion
Florence Dwyer and Jacob Dwyer
David Dale Gallery
a blizzard in slow motion
Florence Dwyer and Jacob Dwyer
07/06—13/07/2024
Open: Friday + Sunday: 11am-6pm
On the 3rd March 2024, my brother, Jacob, returned to the UK without telling anyone. It was his first time back in 15 years. Walking down Haddon Drive, he spotted the house of his old friend, Tom. The front door was slightly open, so he walked inside.
Standing in Tom’s living room, Jacob looked towards the now disused fireplace and remembered one of his friend’s many sayings: “If a bird falls down a chimney it means death’s approaching.” But isn’t that quite obvious, as if a bird falls down a chimney it’s probably dead.
a blizzard in slow motion combines Jacob’s audio recordings, gleaned whilst inside the house of his old friend, with a series of ceramic sculptures that I have produced in response. The sculptures take their formal departure from a fireback; a cast iron slab sitting at the back of a fireplace designed to simultaneously protect the bricks of a building from fire, whilst also radiating heat back into the room.
Excerpt from response text:
Open up your loving arms, watch out here I come
by Caitlin Merrett King
On the 11th April, a bird fell down the chimney in our fat. It clattered around behind the metal grate in the wall where the freplace once stood, leaving the cracked hearth covered in brick dust and whatever else matter has been living in the chimney breast for over a century. I called Glasgow City Council pest control service who told me it sounded like a bird had in actual fact` made a nest at the very top of the chimney. Did you know that it is illegal to remove birds nests, and that all wild birds and their eggs are protected by law? The pest control guy tells me to call him back in July if I can still hear the bird, once the babies have fown the nest. My partner tapes a blanket over the grate and over the top leans a framed collage of a cat.
As a new mother myself, you’d think that I’d have more empathy for the bird and her imminent chicks, but it was mostly just an irritating coincidence that a bunch of baby birds might keep me even more awake than my own three month old baby currently was. At that time, throughout the night, aforementioned baby was waking up every forty-fve minutes. This is something that occurs when babies are struggling to connect their sleep cycles –– which each last roughly forty to ffty minutes, about half the time of an adult’s sleep cycle. This exhausting phenomena is often comically anthropomorphised (one of my typical late night paranoid Google searches tells me) as ‘the forty-fve minute intruder’.
Read the full response here.
Images: Installation View, Florence and Jacob Dwyer, a blizzard in slow motion, David Dale Gallery, 2024
Photo Credit: Max Slaven