The Ridge Salon 2
Clare Lees & Cora Weiss
Crow (photograph, tif) @Cora Weiss, 2025
Metallic Starling (oil on unstretched canvas, 22 x 19 cms, tif) @Cora Weiss, 2025
Resonant Rook (photograph, tif), ©Cora Weiss, 2025
Listening to Katja’s recording of the Dawn Chorus suggested to Clare Cora’s painting, Metallic Starling. Cora made the painting in response to artist Anton Geryon’s image bank for their joint show Dub Ft at Salt Space Gallery, Glasgow (May 2025).
Cora’s painting of this startling bird (Aplonis metallica, the ‘shining starling’) resonated with Clare whose own interest in birds had long been prompted by Cora’s observational practices and photography of, among other birds, crows, rooks, and jackdaws.
Clare’s associations with the Dawn Chorus and with Metallic Starling led her to invite Cora to co-respond to Katja’s prompt and to explore our kinship with birds and with each other.
We are literary historian and artist, mother and daughter. Working together for the first time for Ridge Salon 2, we are now developing the work into a second piece on kin, prompted by Cora’s Resonant Rook image.
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KIN
A CHAIN of references
A CHORUS of images (at least a beginning)
From Cora to Clare. Looping back to the collaboration between Cora and Anton. To Cora’s kinship with birds. To Cora and the Crow.
Across time, media, image, relationships (Cora, Clare, birds, Katja’s girl with the finch in her mouth).
Cyclical. Sequencing. Recycling. Resonating. Generating images and ideas.
Always more than one.
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Biographies
Clare Lees is Director of the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London and Professor of Medieval Literature. Her recent work explores how modern and contemporary poets, writers, and artists engage with early medieval cultures. She is a co-convenor of the London-wide Out of Practice Seminar (Oops) collective, which is open to artists, academics, and writers interested in creative-critical practices. Clare sees English Studies as a wide-ranging, inclusive discipline committed to a broad and generous definition of its field, from the earliest centuries of writing in English to its most contemporary digital iterations.
Cora Weiss is a multi-disciplinary artist exploring image production and compilation, and their use for atmosphere construction in paint, print, and photography. Awarded the MFA with Distinction from the Glasgow School of Art (2022-24), they also hold a BA in Fine Art (First Class) from Newcastle University (2018-2022). Recent shows in Glasgow include Dub Ft. at Salt Space Gallery, Chaos Reigns at David Dale Gallery Warehouse and Swatched x Blush at the Pipe Factory. They have also exhibited internationally in HFBK x GSA at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg (2023). Weiss is concerned with different modes of image-making and value-attaching, and how these allow us to see the world and its media afresh. She is currently Studio Co-ordinator for Strange Field, Glasgow.
Instagram: @weiss.cora