Artworks

WALTON FORD

"ln March 1631, Thomas Dudley, then deputy governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote a letter to the wife (Lady Bridget, Countess of Lincoln) of his former employer, recounting his first year in the new colony. Toward the end of his account of the vicissitudes of colonial life – the struggle to obtain and store provisions, the lamented deaths amongst the settlers – he records that large flocks of passenger pigeons flew over the newly established towns on the eighth of March, flocks large enough to block the sun. He ends the account with the quote inscribed by Walton Ford in Visitation: ‘What it portends I know not.”

Who would have thought that in three hundred years, the passenger pigeon would be declared extinct? New settlers relentlessly cut down forests, domesticated prairies, and destroyed the natural habitats of this species. The passenger pigeon’s tendency to live together in extremely large communities also made them vulnerable to a new predator – the settlers who saw these flocks as food or unwanted pests. Visitation is a visual metaphor with multiple interpretations. For instance, this well-fed flock has descended into a field to gorge on the bounty of the land – a met-aphor perhaps for territorial, mercantile, or industrial colonialism that exploits the land and resources of the colonized. Walton Ford has suggested another inter-pretation: There is a human prosperity to place the blame on the victims of exploitation to find reasons for why they deserve to be exploited. Such justifictions are as old as the human race itself."

– David Kiehl