Between Starshine and Clay
Bat Conservation at Mammoth Cave National Park
I am a visual artist who paints music. I use my natural ability to associate musical harmony with color to identify and track patterns found in music with colorful, linear, pastel paintings. I believe that music arises from our life experiences, and I often integrate text and markings into the musical patterns in my paintings that serve as evidence of the source of music in the many different ways we process, value, and document our experience of the world around us. Most recently, I have focused on connections between music and landscapes, using the color patterns in satellite images of habitat loss to enhance musical patterns, which then carry the weight of that loss. The immense scale of the natural world makes the loss of whole ecosystems difficult to see without having images from beyond Earth's atmosphere. In fact, the rapid pace of habitat loss and extinction seems to be invisible to us, unless we are purposefully paying attention to patterns that span millennia. Every once and awhile, though, something happens to bring it all home. This collection of paintings stems from one such incident, as it turns out, involving a bat.
Fire in the Bush 13X30 Pastel on paper
|
Satellite image of Australian Bush Fires 2020
|
On one otherwise ordinary day in 2007, I found a tiny bat grounded under the awning of the federal courthouse in Chicago. It was delicate, strange, and compelling. It was also fragile, frightened, and immensely vulnerable. As a result, I developed a fascination with bats, and ultimately, a different sense of my place in the world. Maybe this was destiny at work. After all, many bats convert sound to vision, and so do I.
My drawing of bats after the fall - click for detail
|
The federal courthouse in Chicago, where the bat fell
|
|
Since that single incident, I have learned some of the facts and folklore of bats. For example, just over the course of 2020, when bats came under fire from misconceptions about the source and spread of covid 19, some uplifting events in the bat world came to pass:
The New York Times reported that new species of ginger-furred, black-winged bat was discovered in the Nimba Mountains of Guinea, confirming that Halloween bats actually exist. The record for the longest migration by a bat was broken by a pipistrelle flying 2,224 kilometres from Latvia to Spain. Data logged from GPS trackers carried by bats in Portugal captured them using orographic lift to reach a height of 1600 meters in 20 seconds of flight, closer to the speed of a falcon. |
The New York Times announces a new species of bat
|
Millions of bats fly together - Photo Credit Ann Froschauer
|
Bats have occupied our imagination for thousands of years. They are mainly creatures of the night, a realm we fundamentally diurnal beings can’t really penetrate. Beyond their obvious connection to Transylvania, bats represent good fortune in China, appearing on artwork and architecture from ancient times. A protected species of horseshoe bats in Ireland lives in the same tower where William Butler Yeats wrote his poetry. Nowdays, we watch bat colonies on weather radar and flock to their homes under bridges and in caves, just to feel the beat of a million wings above us. We catalog their presence and distinct echolocation with various instruments designed to see more and further into their place in the intricate web of nature. We know they lead complex emotional lives, with devotion to their kindred. They fight, and take simple pleasures in life.
|
|
However, as truly extraordinary as bats are, they are equally vulnerable, in particular to habitat loss and global warming. In early 2021, a deadly winter storm killed an estimated 30,000 in Texas. In 2020, a record heatwave in Australia kill 1/3 of the population of endangered spectacled flying foxes. White nose syndrome affects and threatens at least 13 species in North America and many more in Europe and Asia. Increased demand for tequila and mescal has caused producers of agave to clone and harvest the plant before it flowers, critically reducing the pollen sustaining at least three species of bats the United States and Mexico.
|
Flying Foxes dead in Australia
|
The question of how to communicate the magic of bats and their vulnerability and loss is a vital one. Given how much we depend on bats to silently and sometimes exclusively pollinate or protect the plants that are critical to our survival, and consume the insects that devastate our crops, our best science indicates that in the long term, we won’t exist without them. Bats are like medicine to us, they effectively reduce the population of insects that cause illness and death to us, silently and mysteriously healing our communities. As we continue to exercise dominion over their roosts and critical foods, we become less healthy and less fulfilled. We have long believed that bats are magical, mythical creatures with the power to charm us and determine our fortune. Now, we know that is true.
Calls of Leisler's Noctule in color
|
But along with that existential ultimatum comes something else – when we lose bats, we lose the story of their place in nature, their chirping voices that when slowed to our own ears turn into mysterious whistling songs, their intelligent navigation of sight and sound, night and day, dark and light, space and flight. Their spirit voices teach me how sound becomes vision, and color. They say we are bound to each other, that we should protect and celebrate the things that connect us. If we listen more closely, we might hear them beg us to be kinder, wilder and less proud. They might tell us not to seal our collective fate, but to acknowledge it and tell the truth, and shape the future differently.
|
This collection of work represents a devotion to bats and all that they are. Using a wide selection of instrumental music and songs, I celebrate the remarkable qualities of bats and their unique place in our daily lives and imagination. I also look at patterns produced by the instruments we use to track, hear, and see bats, and how technology brings color to their otherwise invisible lives. Inescapably, though, these works also reveal how a single moment of vulnerability can yield devotion, knowledge, myth, and magic. How music and color might preserve things of immense value, before it is too late to help.
Photo credit Jacopo Werther
|
Photo credit
Javier Abalos
|