Adagio
for Found Feathers
Adagio
for Found Feathers
This series is currently available as archival quality fine art prints, offered individually or in sets of four in a time-limited edition running from April 6 to May 6, 2026. Please follow this link for more information.
This series emerged from a chance encounter with the works of German
artist Rebecca Horn; more specifically, her performance titled Feather Fingers,
from 1972. I stumbled upon a still image from it online and it felt like one of
those dreams you wake up from and keep thinking about all day; more than that,
it felt like an invitation.
Horn described the work as a piece about sensitivity: her sense of touch becoming so disrupted by the added feathers that it triggered “contradictory sensations,” with the hands feeling “as symmetrical (and as sensitive) as a bird’s wing.” For me, something about this spoke not only of sensorial perception, but also of dream perception. In dreams, especially lucid ones, my body often feels this way: sensitive like a feather on a bird’s wing, in a uniquely contradictory state.
I have an extensive collection of feathers that I found while walking through city streets over the years; they, too, remind me of dreams. I like to believe that when the soul takes flight, whether in dreams or in death, it sheds memories the way a bird sheds feathers along its path.
I often dream I am someone or something other than myself. I dream of people, places, and objects unknown to me, and times other than the one we share at this now moment. I greet the images from these dreams the way I greet the feathers I find along my walking path: some I pass by and leave undisturbed; others I collect and carry with me. I store them like a small gift, offering, or souvenir; sometimes, I create from them.
Rebecca Horn’s work invited me to create from them—those feathers, but also the memories. This week, I took the invitation and created a series of self-portraits that are part homage, part continuation, part personal translation.
Horn described the work as a piece about sensitivity: her sense of touch becoming so disrupted by the added feathers that it triggered “contradictory sensations,” with the hands feeling “as symmetrical (and as sensitive) as a bird’s wing.” For me, something about this spoke not only of sensorial perception, but also of dream perception. In dreams, especially lucid ones, my body often feels this way: sensitive like a feather on a bird’s wing, in a uniquely contradictory state.
I have an extensive collection of feathers that I found while walking through city streets over the years; they, too, remind me of dreams. I like to believe that when the soul takes flight, whether in dreams or in death, it sheds memories the way a bird sheds feathers along its path.
I often dream I am someone or something other than myself. I dream of people, places, and objects unknown to me, and times other than the one we share at this now moment. I greet the images from these dreams the way I greet the feathers I find along my walking path: some I pass by and leave undisturbed; others I collect and carry with me. I store them like a small gift, offering, or souvenir; sometimes, I create from them.
Rebecca Horn’s work invited me to create from them—those feathers, but also the memories. This week, I took the invitation and created a series of self-portraits that are part homage, part continuation, part personal translation.