Category Archives: ryedale folk museum

Corbie, bran, cigfran…AKA the Raven!

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Ravens have captivated me for most of my life and I am fortunate to live in an area where I see them often. When I summit Ingleborough there will invariably be a pair flying around and I see them when I am running over Plover Hill and Pen-y-ghent. These intelligent members of the corvid (crow) family are also the largest and the ones that feature most in the folklore and mythology of cultures from all over the world. (Below are just a few photos I’ve taken over the years, note the difference in size between the raven and the crow in the last photo!).

For Charms and Murmurings at Ryedale Folk Museum – my latest Collections exhibition with Josie Beszant & Charlotte Morrison – we are showing work inspired by the folklore, mythology and stories surrounding birds. Ravens feature in many of our pieces including our collaborative work ‘Corvid’. I made a template showing the primary and secondary wing feathers of a raven and we each made fourteen feathers that, when collected together, formed a pair of ‘wings’. I love the distinctive primaries on a raven’s wing that look like fingers stroking the sky.

The three of us at the opening of Charms and Murmurings
(l-r: Charlotte, Josie, me)

My collagraph feathers are inspired by the many places throughout Yorkshire that are named after ravens and also the Norse myth of Odin and his two ravens, Huginn & Muninn (Charlotte’s feathers are ceramic and Josie’s are paper collages).

Ravens are carrion eaters and, because of this, they were often associated with death and loss. They are also ‘talking birds’ that are able to mimic human speech and this is thought to be the reason that they appear as messengers in so many myths, often travelling between worlds, to bring news to their human companions. Back in 2000, I created a raven collagraph inspired by Celtic mythology and called The Messenger:

25 years later(!) I have chosen to explore the story of Odin’s ravens and for Charms and Murmurings I have created this piece entitled Thought and Memory:

Huginn (Thought) and Muninn (Mind or Memory) would sit beside Odin – often regarded as the God of Ravens, the dead and warfare – and each morning he sent them out across the world and they would report back on everything they saw and heard. The names of the ravens are difficult to translate but Huginn is thought to represent the intellect/comprehension/perception and Muninn the emotions/memory/urges (to put it very simply). Whilst researching ravens, I came across an article that referenced a quote from the Poetic Edda called Grímnismál (in old Icelandic):

Huginn ok Muninn fljúga hverjan dag Jormungrund yfir;

óumk ek of Hugin, at hann aptr né komit, pó sjámk meirr um Munin.

A translation of this is:

Thought and Memory fly every day the whole world over;

each day I fear that Thought may not return, yet I fear more for Memory.

This really resonated with me and, coming at the idea from an ecological viewpoint, I wanted to depict Thought (Huginn) as living in the natural world that we see and experience physically and I have used the branches of an ash tree which directly links to the sacred ash tree (Yggdrasil) in Norse myth. I’ve created moths to fly among the branches symbolising thoughts and the spirit.

For Memory (Muninn), I depicted the roots of an ash tree with fossils caught amongst them representing the past, our memories and the underworld realm of the dead. The fact that Odin was an elderly man and that he feared losing Muninn more than Huginn made me think about the devastating disease of dementia. Losing our cognitive ability and short-term memories, we become lost in our own world unable to make sense of the here and now and often become physically lost both to our families and friends but also in reality when we can’t find the associations needed to navigate in the world around us. I am not really sure how this collagraph relates to my thoughts but I made it with them whirring around in the background.

NB some people believe that Huginn and Muninn were linked to Odin himself and that through shamanic practices he would send his own thought and mind journeying across the world. Ravens have often been a bird that humans and mythic beings were thought to transform into.

As is usual with my work, there are layers of thought behind it and some I won’t be able to verbalise for a while (there is something about ‘ash dieback’ in there I think!). I often create my prints from ideas that are more instinctive and come from experiences that link to things I feel but haven’t found a way to express in words. This is why I love to meet people at art fairs and discuss my work with them. At the Saltaire Inspired Winter Makers Fair last weekend, I had some wonderful discussions about my new work and found that visitors were providing insights that made me feel like shouting ‘yes, yes, that’s it!’.

Corbie – collagraph print

Finally, this last piece is part of my ‘animal, vegetable, mineral’ series that takes my feather collection as inspiration and links to manmade objects and the plant world. Here I have created collagraphs of a raven feather, a sprig of bog myrtle (sweet gale) and a piece of Viking hack silver which is actually from a former project. Bog Myrtle is thought to be a plant that the vikings used to create a drink which helped them ‘berserk’ before going into battle! There is an interesting article about the varied uses of the plant HERE.

Thank you to everyone that has visited the exhibition and for all of your feedback. I welcome your ideas and experiences about birds, folklore and my work so please do feel free to comment below.

Charms and Murmurings is on at Ryedale Folk Museum until 2nd November.

Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

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Gawk, Gawk, Gawky, Gog, Gok, Hobby and Welsh Ambassador are all names for the Common Cuckoo, a bird synonymous with so many different superstitions and folklore that it is hard to know where to start! For me it is very much a bird that heralds the coming of spring. I often hear one calling from a small copse near the quarry in Horton-in-Ribblesdale in April.

The migratory cuckoo flies to the UK from North Africa and is only with us for a short time but has given its name to many things including a number of plants. There are lots of cuckoo flowers including cardamine pratensis (aka lady’s smock) and lychnis flos-cuculi (aka ragged robin). Cuckoo Bread is another name for wood-sorrel, cuckoo buttons for spear thistle, cuckoo boots for bluebell and cuckoo’s eye for herb robert to name just a few.

For Charms and Murmurings at Ryedale Folk Museum, I have based two prints on the cuckoo. Here is the first:

This three plate collagraph depicts the cuckoo itself, two ‘cuckoo flowers’ and a cuckoo feather and it gains its title from the Medieval English round ‘Sumer is Icumen in‘. This is also known as the Summer Canon or the Cuckoo Song and roughly translates as ‘summer has come’.

Cuckoos are well-known for being ‘brood parasites’ which means that they don’t build their own nests and, once mated, the female lays her eggs in the nest of another bird such as a meadow pipit or dunnock. It is believed that the cuckoo’s resemblance to a bird of prey helps to frighten the host bird away from the nest allowing the cuckoo the opportunity to lay her egg. She can lay up to 25 eggs in different nests of her chosen species (they usually have a preferred host) and will replace one of the bird’s existing eggs with hers. The baby cuckoo develops very quickly and, on hatching, often kicks out the remaining eggs or hatched chicks from the nest. The host will then raise her huge alien baby as her own.

Maybe because of this unusual behaviour, the cuckoo has also become a bird associated with fertility, infidelity and lasciviousness. The word cuckold describes the husband of an adulterous wife who might unwittingly raise a child from that union as his own. It is linked directly to the cuckoo and appears frequently in the works of Shakespeare. Gowk is one of my ‘animal vegetable, mineral’ collagraph prints:

For this series I have taken feathers from my feather collection (it is extensive!) or referenced an online feather library for the animal part. The vegetable part depicts a plant and the mineral is based on a real or imagined manmade object. In this case we have an undertail covert cuckoo feather, arum maculatum (aka cuckoo pint) and a pottery sherd from a Delft birthplate. Cuckoo Pint gains its name from the word ‘pintle’ which is an old English word for penis and the fact that somebody once thought it resembled a cuckoo’s penis. I’ve always known it as Lords and Ladies but apparently that too is a rather suggestive name with it originally being written as Lord’s and Lady’s because someone thought the plant resembled the genitalia of both sexes! With regards to the plate, I have two sisters and my mum commissioned a plate for each of our births. The traditional blue and white Delftware had our names, birth dates and the time of our birth was shown on the clock. If you want to see what the whole plate looks like, they are still in production, an example can be seen here. I created a collagraph/drypoint pottery sherd as my artefact just showing a part of the cradle.

These are just two approaches to the stories surrounding the amazing cuckoo. Celebrated in festivals across the country, some believed that turning a coin in your pocket on hearing a cuckoo would bring good fortune whilst others thought the cuckoo’s habits could determine the outcome of the year’s harvest. There’s a lovely blog post by Jo Woolf in Argyll where you can read about more beliefs here

In my next post I will be talking all about the raven. If you’d like to see my work and the lovely pieces made by Josie Beszant and Charlotte Morrison, you can visit our exhibition at Ryedale Folk Museum until 2nd November 2025.