Magnesium Bird

Magnesium Bird, 2004 re-mastered 2010 and 2021, is an evocative and haunting work filmed in the 18th Century walled gardens at Harewood House (Yorkshire, UK), part of a landscape design by Capability Brown, c1772. In it we see several small birds sculpted out of magnesium ribbon ignited seemingly spontaneously, at dusk. The sculpted birds burst into flames creating balls of white fire that billow huge mounds of smoke punctuating the landscape before us. In the background a small group of children (the artists’s own son, nieces and nephews) play in front of a series of large greenhouses whose windows reflect the density of the sky above further disrupting the stillness of the space. Shot during stormy weather and torrential downpours, Biswas’s intention in Magnesium Bird was for its overarching structure to be led by the sound design within the film lasting 9 minutes 28 seconds and comprising the voices and conversations of the children at play in the background eerily set against the stormy weather. By contrast, the duration of the visual footage lasts 28 seconds such that the point of view of the camera moves across a fixed distance across the walled garden from left to right on a continuous loop. For Biswas, her intention was for this visual loop to mimic the movement of a carriage on a traditional manual typewriter, as if to evoke a constant searching of language and words.

Through the symbolic representation of birds in this work, the film represents a rite of passage for Biswas - the subject of the artist’s last conversation with her father (who loved language) before he died and that the first sound she heard after his death was bird song. The subject of Magnesium Bird in part is that of love and loss. It presents a visceral encounter which through the rich visual imagery and soundtrack, viewers are transported to a place somewhere within their own past. The art historian and author Moira Roth was present during the filming of this work, and recounts, ''There was (intentionally) no audience for this event.'' Perhaps because all those who were present were active participants in its making, like those who are involved in preparations for a funeral. Roth continues, ''For a brief moment [during filming] the orchard was transformed into a supernatural world of magical birds and mythic children, a world of fire and smoke... then ashes to ashes, dust to dust...'

The art critic Robert Clark wrote of this work, ''Shifting from painting to film, her [Biswas's] installations now work on multiple levels of almost Bunuelesque visual poetry." (Sutapa Biswas: Nottingham, in The Guardian Guide, Saturday September 18th, 2004).