I found this perfectly exquisite blackbird lying dead in an alleyway, so I made the ink drawings directly and quickly from the body onto separate sheets of paper. I wanted to reference traditional Memento Mori imagery so I used my lovely Pelham Puppet Skeleton to gently hold the blackbird’s skull. When I dug the exquisite bones out of the soil I was struck by the startling contrast between the weightless delicacy of the skull and the heavy, coarsely textured dense mass of the earth.There are many wonderful folklore narratives woven around blackbirds and after reading various tales, imagining images and listening to its song, I drew my own stories about this beautiful bird by adding drawings of objects from my own collections alongside the original studies of the blackbird.