The Bird Alphabet exhibition

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Jim Racine graduated from the Royal College of Art, but began his career at the Colchester Institute. This show is a début of bronze sculptures and painting around the concept of a new visual language called the Bird Alphabet.

The Bird Alphabet is a new sculptural written language, for birds. It’s an attempt to create a language by which sculpture can be made, as separate from any human communication and the species that made it. Anyone seeking relative values in this work will find that this meaning is for the birds.
The work is about placing the human artifact in nature, perhaps for nature, within the landscape where it can command the pictorial, bring sky to earth and earth to sky. It is seeking an ideal for civilised aspirations and the extraordinary, which is always out of reach.

The challenging outdoor works in the Minories garden are from the Monumenty and Bird Alphabet series. Monumenties like Angelic and Caryatid are monuments to an unstated future happening. A Monumenty is very likely to survive the species which made it.
The small bronze maquettes are intended for expanding into future projects. A large version of the guardian is currently being made for a private commission.

Jim is a master bronze caster at Butley Mills Studios, Suffolk, specialized in making the 'uncastable' and using innovative foundry techniques. He makes every sculpture personally from the beginning to the end of the process. Bronze casting and courses are available at his Suffolk studio.

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