Kate Hanson Foster

Crow Funeral Kate Hanson Foster

Crow Funeral is the end result of intention and design gone off script. What began as fascination with a phenomenon of crows congregating in overwhelming numbers around one of their fallen, eventually became a collection that merges an interest in the neurological wiring of birds with a mother's battle with postpartum depression and anxiety.



We as humans have the tendency to anthropomorphize what we have deep need for-ritual, spectacle, and ceremony, and above all, meaning. If crows can orchestrate an event to mourn their own, then perhaps it is proof that even birds have a built-in urgency to center themselves inside of life's chaos. And yet, it's likely that crows do not mourn at all, and instead they simply reflexively react to something potentially dangerous. There is no deeper significance to the event at all, profound as it may appear.



How do you raise children, pray, or write poems in a world with no meaning? Crow Funeral dismisses meaning as a construct concluded from a certain set of metaphysical "signs," and instead simultaneously accepts and rejects God and meaning in search of an exactness that only language can create.