Inheritance
Sravya Mamidanna
Artwork for ‘Birds‘ (Issue 26)
The Science
On its first migration, the juvenile bar-tailed godwit flies across 10,000-13,000 kilometres of open ocean toward a coast it has never seen, along a path it was never taught. To make the longest known non-stop flight of any bird, it more than doubles its body weight in fat while its gut and liver shrink, reallocating the body almost entirely to fuel and flight muscle. Under sufficient ecological opportunity, such long-distance strategies can regress toward shorter migrations, though only over many generations. The artwork depicts this migratory program as endogenous; a life carried by an inheritance set down long before.
Further information:
The Medium
'Inheritance' is a digital painting rendered on Sketchbook on an Ipad (10th generation).
Associated Poem
The associated poem explores how much of any life is carried by an inheritance set down long before it, by a knowing that adapts on a scale no single life will ever witness.
No Bird Has Shown It
It wakes one autumn heavier than sense allows,
having eaten the shore into itself —
the mudfla's worms, the tide's slow larder —
and then, because the going asks it, eats the rest:
the gut,
the liver,
the red works spent into its wings
until what's left is only what can fly.
And it flies —
into an ocean it has not seen,
a heading nothing marked,
sure of a shore it could not have known.
No bird has shown it.
How far can knowing carry
an unknown body?
The Artist
Sravya Mamidanna paints frequently, and writes poetry occasionally, usually when a subject refuses to leave her alone. As a child, she cared for an injured parrot whose eventual release she has never quite finished thinking about. Her work is inspired by moments of awe, curiosity, and connection with the living world.
Copyright statement. This work is published under the CC BY-NC-SA license