More about Bat's Remorse

 

The idea for this piece began with a photo of a prehistoric bat fossil I saw in a science magazine. It looked eerily human! Everywhere we look even deep in the past we see things that remind us of ourselves or make us wary of what could become of us. I initially thought that the sculpture would hang on the wall like a modern bat, but that would be just bat and it needed to be more human somehow. It needed to be more personal, I didn’t want to pin it up like a paleontological artifact. 

 

I decided to have it roosting in, lighting on, the shards of a storm-splintered tree riddled with woodpecker drillings that I had found in the woods. The tree fragments add a layer to the  story, about habitats—human, bats, birds, insects all living together in well, close quarters,

 

But the story didn’t end with the bat in the tree shards. One winter day, our furnace stopped working because a real bat flew down our chimney and into the furnace motor looking for a warm place, The bat's wrong turn gave me the idea to put the whole thing on a furnace flue pipe. The last layer of the bat's story is about our climate-changing activity, life and death on a very large scale, and will we make one of those critical wrong turns?