Toni Cogdell: Ambition Bird, a solo show

Toni’s solo show in Essex at Turner Art Perspective, a collection of over 20 new original works will be on show at the Chelmsford Gallery.

The Exhibition by Toni Cogdell

The blueprint of an artist overlays my life. I live within the shimmer of its lines, glowing and expectant, always sensing its presence. I wear it, it follows me. A flutter in the darkness, something that won’t still, something like Anne Sexton’s Ambition Bird perhaps, from her poem of the same name. Visiting her at 3.15am I imagine it flapping and flitting between her ribs and lungs, a heart-space of longing; all fury, terror and joy willing itself to form. I recognise in this poem that deep-seated need, in spite of all sense and folly, to create, to make art. Unpicking the chaos of our inner life to piece together something that might just resonate, with ourselves and others. The ambition bird is the creative path, feathered and armoured; it’s the muse and the monster. I feel it in my own work and life and sense it in the work of other artists throughout time who made their offering to this unrelenting drive: we share this restless pursuit. We build a life around it.

The line between making art and living life can often blur. Carrying shopping bags, headlines poured over, a phone call from a friend – the wings are always in motion, they turn from moment to moment. It is a strange thing to state: life informs my art and art teaches me how to live. And always, this force, this flood. The wanting of things out of reach, a need to make something from nothing, a creative hunger that’s hard to separate from the human. Those ambition birds rising again, rushing toward the sun like Icarus, their unkempt yet eager wings with fortified feathers finding only comfort in the heat. They drive my direction through life and art, while the figures in my paintings take them on, wrestle with them, and through the tussle of paint, words and collage, begin to find their own story.