Following on from the falling frogs, these are collaged birds cut from cartridge that was painted mostly black on the reverse and colourful on what I’d intended to be the front. There are seven different shapes along with some separate wings that I thought might be useful in indicating flight in a series of static photos. In the end, I used one of them in a stop-motion video which took an inordinate amount of time but which has left me feeling a tad triumphant!

Like the frogs, these seem capable of a life beyond one painting and, having dangled the frogs on lengths of cotton from a piece of batoning, I can see both a 3D value in this and a thematic thread.

This is a deliberate fourth wall breach which, if we’re going get literary about it, encourages the viewer to see the birds as living creatures escaping their pictorial cage. One of them has a slightly upturned wing showing the colourful plumage beneath. All of them, apart from what may be a crow down at the bottom, are in the act of tumbling, although why and from what is not given. The marks on the visible surface are from the painting that was sacrificed for this project.

To make a video using images such as these, each one needs to have its background rendered as greenscreen so that the video software can be directed to ignore it. Critically, if there’s a lot of green in the target image(s), it’s possible to specify a colour that doesn’t appear anywhere in the materials. Some people choose purple but here, green is ok to use.

© Suzanne Conboy-Hill 2025