East as the Crow Flies

Our grad project started with an interest in the intersection of animals and urbanity, eventually focusing on observing crows within the city of Vancouver.

As the sun sets in Vancouver, crows fly from all across the city to sleep in one big flock. Like clockwork they come and go between Still Creek and their various foraging grounds. Every crow has a favourite place in the city where they spend the day looking for food. As we make our way to school, we always come across the same crows. They’ll greet us for a moment (and ask for food) before we go our separate ways. Just like any other human with a busy day’s schedule ahead of them, they’ve got work to do!

Alex Chung and I chose to make this piece in collaboration because of our interests in different aspects of city life. For me, it was the animals and my relationship to them, transcendent of language or communication as humans do with one another. Alex was interested in urban infrastructure, and the different ways that they construct or alleviate pathways. Together, this project culminated into an observation on Vancouver crows, using the site of Still Creek (a major roosting spot for crows) as research. Through time spent looking at crows and noticing the ways they move in and out of Still Creek, our project is an interpretation of these behaviours, which we found were not dissimilar at all to the ways that humans move. A gathering of crows experiencing death and grief destabilizes human exceptionalism, and the idea that humans are the only ones with capabilities to feel and communicate with complexity. Crows are like us in so many ways, they mourn, organize, remember, and teach. Each night they even have a rush hour! When the crows fly home, they use the same paths across the sky like their very own network of highways and roads. Using both representational and more abstracted elements in the work, we created a narrative of these urban crows that to us reflect their likeness to humans.

Other Works

Illustrations