Man’s, or woman’s, first images reflected deference to the animals they lived alongside. Those ancient images reveal potency alongside a crude delicacy. Kerry Kirkwood’s work contains and defines these essences. Complexity plays with elemental simplicity.

Polarities are explored. Foreground and background may be, at first viewing, indecipherable. Then images emerge. Man and animal and earth are each other…

Kirkwood’s first impressions began in the 1960s on the hills of the Scottish countryside. As a young adolescent who worked as a shepherd, there was both fascination and reverence for animals.

Their vulnerabilities – in their captured lives, in their giving birth and in the organisation of their brutalized premature deaths – had a profound impact on Kirkwood’s intuitions and left the deepest impressions in terms of visual and sense memory.

Those damaged, orphaned or rejected at the very moment of birth were regarded as useless ‘commodities’ by others, but Kirkwood felt their lives were precious and sought to protect them.

And the metaphor for her work? How to keep ourselves in life. IN life…but outside of the ‘commodity’ view.