Ken Currie, The Bear, 2022
£ 1,200
Flowers Gallery is pleased to present The Scottish Bestiary, a new series of 7 etchings by the artist Ken Currie, inspired by the writings of the former UK poet Laureate Ted Hughes (1930-1998).
Like many Scottish teenagers I was introduced to Ted Hughes’s poetry in my 5th year at secondary school in the 1970s. Our English teacher presented us with poems from Hughes’s Lupercal collection from 1960. I was stunned by the imagery and Hughes’s entirely unsentimental view of animals and the natural world. The poems spoke to me of my own experience in my home town where violence toward, and of, animals was a commonplace spectacle. And, of course, the violence that went beyond the animal, into the human world. Often it seemed at that time that my own home patch, my neck of the woods, was one long drama of violence, human and animal. The debt I owe Hughes is that his work, among others, was instrumental in setting me on a path that pulled me out of that world, opening up new horizons.
Later, when I went to art school, I was introduced to the work of Francis Bacon and his early paintings of animals seemed to me to viscerally connect with Hughes. At art school I read Hughes’s Crow collection again and again. This work confirmed for me that our world of violence and brutality could be transfigured through poetry into something altogether mythic - in other words, into great, cathartic art, like Bacon’s.
Ken Currie, 2019
His work has stayed with me ever since, its power undiminished and in fact, ever more revealing. Hughes is someone I have returned to throughout my life - in particular his poems about animals. I find in the poems that most interest me an incredible incisiveness in the language - visceral, gory and unflinching.
Reading interviews with Francis Bacon I noted how he often referred to the ancient Greek drama The Oresteia by Aeschylus as an influence. I of course read it, in various translations, but found the language and theatrical goriness difficult to connect with. That is, until I read Ted Hughes’s translation when the bloody drama came to life through Hughes’s profound understanding of the gravitas of real violence and its baleful transformative effect.
For many years I have wanted to somehow make images after Hughes’s poems. I felt it as a pressure I was unable to resist. Painting them seemed like some obvious, overblown thing but to translate them into graphic works, etchings - that felt absolutely right. In a way etching is about doing violence to a pristine sheet of metal - gouging, biting, scraping and through huge pressures imprinting an image onto paper.
Ken Currie, 2019
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