Description
Archival giclee print on heavyweight Canson Aquarelle fine art paper, with hand painted metallic pigment background.
Limited edition of 20 (signed and numbered), size 100 x 100 cm / ca. 39.4 x 39.4 in
‘Bats I’ is based on original Indian ink paintings of African Straw Coloured fruit bats and baobab flowers. It is a mixed media work, where the artist digitally assembled the final composition from the individual paintings of bats and flowers. The background is hand painted in bright metallic pigment, and the eyes of the bats are overlaid with phosphorescent paint, giving an eerie afterglow when the lights are switched off.
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 work is faithful to Nature but resonant with myth. Baobab 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.
‘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 materialised world and the archetypal dreamscape morph into one.
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.
This piece 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.
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