Description
Archival giclee print in a limited edition of 50 (signed and numbered), on heavyweight Canson Aquarelle fine art paper.
Size: 75 x 75 cm / ca. 29.5 x 29.5 in
‘Bats I’ is based on original Indian ink paintings of African Straw Coloured fruit bats feeding on baobab flowers. Against a backdrop that subtly shifts from dusk to deep night, the fruit bats form a rhythmic assembly, their wings and furry bodies folding like dark petals around the pale blossoms.
These flowers bloom only for a single night, glowing with ephemeral brilliance and releasing a heady scent that draws the bats from great distances. The trees rely on the bats for their survival, and the bats feed on the flowers. It is an exchange both ancient and vital: the bat pollinates, the flower nourishes.
Flowers and bats, their forms at once anatomical and dreamlike, are composed into a pattern that feels both organic and sacred. The baobab blooms open only under cover of darkness and perish with the dawn, symbols of transience and fertility. They act as luminous anchors in the composition: ghostlike, ephemeral, and luxurious. We are witnessing an ancient ecological ritual, one of the myriad of unseen threads of interdependence that uphold the living world which sustains us all.
Fruit bats, so frequently misunderstood or maligned, are here elevated to mythic stature—guardians of night gardens, mediums of regeneration. Their presence with their luminous gaze and nocturnal grace is not ominous but reverent. They become quiet deities of dusk, participating in a cosmic act that perpetuates life.
Bats have long occupied a liminal space in human imagination. In many traditions, they symbolise intuition, rebirth, and the permeability of boundaries between worlds.
This piece, faithful to Nature but resonant with myth, may also be read as a visual evocation of the collective unconscious. The bats evoke archetypes of the hidden, the intuitive, the transformative. In their layered near-symmetry and dreamlike rhythm, they suggest unseen networks of connection – ecological, psychological, and spiritual. We feel a familiar sense of pattern beyond reason, pointing to the encoded logic of nature and the psyche alike, a pattern that feels both organic and sacred.
‘Bats I’ hums with a quiet reverence: for Nature, for the night, for the overlooked, and for the archetypal forces that connect all living things. The image draws us into a mythic space where the ecological and the archetypal meet.
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