The Artist - Kerry Hirth

On one otherwise ordinary day in 2007, I found a tiny bat grounded under the awning of the federal courthouse in Chicago. It was delicate, strange, and compelling. It was also fragile, frightened, and immensely vulnerable. As a result, I developed a fascination with bats, and ultimately, a different sense of my place in the world.
Maybe this was destiny.
Many bats convert sound to vision. As a visual artist who paints music, so do I. I use my natural ability to associate musical harmony with color to identify and track patterns found in music with colorful, linear, pastel paintings. I believe that music arises from our life experiences, and I often integrate text and markings into the musical patterns in my paintings that serve as evidence of the source of music in the many different ways we process, value, and document our experience of the world around us.
This collection of work is dedicated to bats and all that they are. It is also an invitation to continue to probe the mysteries of their lives. Inescapably, though, these works also reveal how a single moment of vulnerability can yield devotion, knowledge, myth, and magic. How music and color might preserve things of great value, before it is too late to help.

Between Starshine and Clay

The title of this exhibition comes from the work of Lucille Clifton.
here on this bridge between starshine and clay
my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me and has failed.

Excerpt from won't you celebrate with me
by Lucille Clifton
Between Starshine and Clay celebrates the resilience and flourishing of bats, between the deep earth and the starry sky.
Read won't you celebrate with me on The Poetry Foundation website.
Learn about Lucille Clifton's legacy at The Clifton House.
Lucille Clifton, “won't you celebrate with me” is published in Book of Light by Copper Canyon Press
Copyright © 1993 by Lucille Clifton

Merlin Tuttle's Bat Conservation

The extraordinary photographs of bats are by Merlin Tuttle, founder and executive director of Merlin Tuttle's Bat Conservation and author of The Secret Lives of Bats. He has studied, photographed, and protected bats worldwide for over 60 years.
Picture
Merlin Tuttle near Bracken Cave in Texas

Dedication

Thank you to Shauna Marquardt, Lori Pruitt, Jill Utrup and Vona Kuczynska for being the first bat scientists to reach out and voice your support for efforts to connect science about bats with art. Thank you to Kathy Proffitt and David Wyrick at Mammoth Cave National Park for taking a chance on me after I cold-called your office. Thank you to Merlin Tuttle's Bat Conservation for providing powerful photographs of bats, and telling me upfront that my artworks must be held to the moral standard of saving actual living bats. Thank you to Andy Hirth, my husband, and Rodney Mulvania, my father, for funding and underwriting these artworks in their entirety, you are the sine qua non of everything you see here.

Permissions

Thank you to the artists who listed your work as Creative Commons. You make the world more beautiful and the internet more accessible. Please contact the artist Kerry Hirth at [email protected] with any issues regarding permissions. I will remove or credit content differently, no infringement or misrepresentation is intended and will be corrected. Please let me know if you'd like to share something I have created here, I would love to return the favor.
This website accompanies an art exhibition of my work at Mammoth Cave National Park, and does not represent any viewpoint of the park itself.