Jim Carter 'I Run the Hollow Wind'
wood, blood, soil, iron, twigs, jackdaw feathers . 90 x 56 cm 


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The headless body of an animal reaches towards the morning light on the winter solstice. Though in traditional thought the aim of separation was to free the mind from the influence of the body, here the "turbulent sphere of the body" is regarded as superior, and humankind's dissociation from the animal a grief and a violation. Existing between the supernatural and the material, the body symbolises nature and its embodied attributes of fertility and rebirth. In both worlds the animal has been shamanically dismembered and re-formed. The head is elsewhere, imagined buried (as the body was, prior to disinterment) at an important point on a tribal boundary or spiritual frontier. In this work, the wounded animal suggests a regeneration; it is not deprived of life but is, in exile and death, master of its fate and talisman for survival of the living. Marked on its hand with a symbol of the sun, and, on its foot, the full moon, in crossed arms it rebels through the mystery of cyclic transformation.

Jim Carter tells animal stories through words and sculpture. More often than not, works are about English wildlife and a sense of its power and vulnerability in relation to humankind. Uneasy or tragic, irrational or obscure, these stories are linked to a real world of suffering and transcendence: making sculpture from organic materials as a means of advocacy, atonement or commemoration; shifting to the written word as a way to enter emotional and numinous spaces of memory and dream. Carter’s aim is to be honest in negotiating the complex experiences that arise in relation to land and animal life: "there is anger, fear, sorrow, death, but also fertility, transformation and renewal, with the central theme being the intimate relationship between land and the human psyche."

Jim Carter received an MA with distinction in Art and Environment from Falmouth University. A member of the Newlyn Society of Artists, his work has appeared in About Place Journal, Unpsychology and Earthlines magazine.