Swallow is a bronze sculpture made with lots of stops and starts happening to it because of the two lockdowns in 2020 and what seemed like a very long lockdown over the first few months of 2021.

The sculpture tells the story of the Swallows that return to White House Farm every year to rear their young as well as another story about how the sculpture was made.

We all love to see the Swallows arriving in April and May, with their acrobatic flights to catch insects in the air to feed their young, a wonderful sight and sign that summer has finally arrived. I have often marvelled at the amazing feat they have undergone to get here, especially as some of my childhood was spent in Botswana, which involved a flight from London to Johannesburg via Frankfurt and Nairobi, with the final stretch on a small plane to Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. I recall it took all day (or night) to get there, in relative comfort with drink and food provided. The Swallows’ journey from South Africa to Suffolk, a journey of around 6000 miles, is taken in stages over a period of six weeks. It is fraught with danger - from bad weather, lack of food on the way, and attacks from birds of prey and ‘Man’ as they cross Africa, the Mediterranean and parts of Europe. And then they do it all over again back to South Africa in our autumn. A sad loss as they disappear for another year, a sign that we are heading in the direction of winter.

How the sculpture was made.

I feel very fortunate to be a member of the Sudbourne Park Printmakers and Butley Mills Studio, where I can experiment with two very different ways of producing a piece of work. However, there is a similarity… they both take an image from something else to produce the final artwork.

It is this that I have used to produce the sculpture Swallow. To start with it was originally a collagraph, like a card collage, which would normally be inked up to be printed by using the etching press. The card collagraph was not printed, but instead was cut and scored to make it into a card sculpture.

This was then made ready to burn out in the kiln at Butley Mills Studios and turned into bronze. The hot molten bronze, during its fiery flow through the negative image in the mould, has added to the final sculpture in a dramatic way.

There was a lot of metal work required to finish off the now bronze sculpture, the big advantage of doing the work yourself is that you can make decisions about what should be machined off and what can be left. I have left the stubs of the runners as evidence of how the piece was poured and by doing so, have turned this ‘page’ of the collagraph into an aerial landscape. There are other subtle and not so subtle additions to the sculpture by the bronze which were not on the original card version which I have also left.

To finish the sculpture, I couldn’t resist trying to etch the bronze at the Sudbourne Park Printmakers’ studios. An experiment to see if I could make the ‘air’ or ‘river’ more obvious by adding an aquatint. This didn’t work quite as I had envisaged, but the acid did bite the bronze down a level, highlighting this area against the landscape imagery.

This journey started as a 2D collage, moved to a card 3D sculpture, then on to a bronze sculpture which was finally modified slightly by using a print technique – etching with a strong solution of Nitric acid. Another amazing journey through quite a few different processes – cutting and pasting, liquid to solid, heat and fire, metal working and finally etching with acid. It was a lot of fun to do.

Shown in an exhibition as part of my Woodland Residency at White House Farm in the summer of 2021.

Jennifer Hall