Miranda Kerrigan

The March

“The earth smelled of raw depths, of the tomb, of flowers. I smelled its smell and started crying, unafraid. I was walking along an unknown street set on either side with white boxes, walking in a getup of bloodstained feathers, alone between the pavements swept clean as on Sunday, weeping bitterly, fully and happily as I never wept again in all my life.” – “The Story of My Dovecot” By Isaac Babel

My research into the holocaust is intertwined with my encounters of nineteenth and twentieth-century Jewish literature. I read everything from short stories about the soldiers in the Red Army to Jewish mothers in New York. But in my mind there is a special connection with Isaac Babel’s “The Story of My Dovecot”, written in 1925, about a pogrom in Russia in 1905. Babel was shot in 1940 in the aftermath of Stalin’s Great Purge, a year before the extermination of the European Jews started. 

The images of a dove in Babel’s story stuck with me when I went to museums, exhibits, and memorials to learn more about the Holocaust. At the same time I had to to reflect on my own complicated feelings, and they entered my artistic explorations of the Death March, as the epitome of forced migration.

This series of work show moments of a Death March. From the very beginning, death is present. The man and the dove appear in separate spaces but truly are one. By the end the transformation of man and bird together is complete. It is not an image of an ascending angel offering salvation, but of a being, nonetheless, existing in darkness.

Drawings, 2018