A Bear Story

I've always been interested in the creation and use of icons and the creation of idols, and the space in between an icon and an idol.

Where I am normally concerned with a female image, and investigating the manipulation of it, the image, and her, the woman; earlier this year I felt I wanted a new icon to help me look at our (human's) confused and damaging relationship with the natural world.

I made a simple, if personal, choice of bear imagery to look at my thoughts on the many environmental and ecological issues that we are constantly confronted with in the news.

Living in the UK, I have no natural relationship with wild bears, nor a close historical connection to a mythical bear. Bears in the UK are Teddy Bears, and any story featuring a bear will be culturally rooted in a distant geography, the American continent , the cold of the North or Eastern continental Europe.

The distance from real lived experience, seemed an appropriate way to start this story. My visual references have been gathered from my own collection of American and British children's story books.