Cuckoo Spite

Cuckoo Spite

Cuckoo Spite

£154.00

By: Mary Gregoriy, 2009
Medium: cast bronze
Size: 91mm
Cast by: Niagara Falls Castings
Issue: The Medal, no 56 (Spring 2010)
Edition: 34

Category:

Mary Gregoriy (b.1959) studied art at Crawford College of Art and Design in Cork, Ireland, graduating with distinction in 1999. The following year she continued her studies as a post-graduate research student at the college’s foundry. At the same time she received several commissions including The Navigator, a sculpture for the promenade in Cobh, County Cork. In 1998 she won a prize in the BAMS Student Medal Project, since when medal commissions have included those for University College Dublin in 2002 and Kildare County Council in 2007. She has been shortlisted five times for coin designs for the Central Bank of Ireland, and in 2007 her design was chosen for a commemorative coin with a Celtic theme. After spending twenty-seven years in Ireland, Gregoriy lived for eighteen months in Norway, which resulted in an exhibition of her paintings and prints, My Norwegian sojourn, in Stavanger in November 2009. She now lives in Alhaurin el Grande in the south of Spain. Principal themes in Mary Gergoriy’s work are fairytales and the cycle of life. About her BAMS medal Cuckoo Spite, she writes: ‘The medal is a medal for Spring. It has a curly almost DNA-like nest on the obverse with one large cuckoo egg in it and a few loose feathers floating free. The reverse shows a little foetal bird lying dead on the path, but it is no ordinary bird because it also has moth wings growing from its back and instead of bird wings it has little human hands lying across its tiny breast. A lot of my work is becoming increasingly chimerical and anthropomorphic in nature. I am not sure why but I think it is because in my head all the nature themes get mixed up and things like genetic modification are issues that trouble me in certain ways – I work subconsciously sometimes but I am certain that these things feed into my work. I anthropomorphise because I think that there is such a strong link between nature and humans even though some humans like to think they are somehow above and unlinked to nature. Yet we are nature – are we not? A part of the world and the creatures that inhabit it. It is a rather sad little medal but, as we all know, nature is red in tooth and claw and cuckoos are only following their own nature.’