Stavanger, Norway
Can we know the essence of a creature so different from us as a bird? Kit Fong Ling attempts this maybe impossible but absolutely worthwhile goal in her monotype series Tjeld (Oystercatchers). Each image features one or more of these fowls, pecking at the ground, walking in a distinctly tilted way, standing on criss-crossed legs, flying with patterned black-and-white wings spread wide. “Liminal Space 1” is the oddest of all, looking at first like a bright orange and red sun shining in a mysteriously dark sky, with a jag of landscape below. Seen within the larger series—or rather, with the rest of its flock—the sun becomes an eye, the black sky is feathers, the jagged landscape reveals the beginnings of a beak. It is an extreme close-up of a tjeld, so close as to become strange, intimate, an intense knowing that is also an unknowing, closeness and apartness present at once. Tjelds have been listed as a near threatened species, and we humans tend to care most for those animals with which we feel a connection, or at least an appreciation. Kit Fong Ling demonstrates a means of doing so.
—Lori Waxman March 16, 12:17 PM