The primeval comic book
I
Why do we need to imagine unreal creatures? When evolution has been so profuse in magical forms, why do we need to imagine still more? It’s there, from the beginning, in the cave paintings at Chauvet (a body with two heads, one behind the other; six antlers settled in a single skull), or the histories of Herodotus, or the drawings of children. As if nature is not enough. There too in the hybrid creatures of Jenny Orchard, the Interbeings she’s been making since the early 1980s. Biomorphs of pure whimsy, folklore incarnate. As if a Miro canvas opened like a bud and its fantastic figures stepped out into the world. Apparitions of myth and legend rising up from within the clay and nudging its surface to be seen.
II
When I was a child I had a friend called Jennifer Bird. Her father was a pilot. When she asked her mother where he was one day, her mother told her he was flying. She thought this must be what happened to all adults when they went to work. That animals were really what adults became when they left the house. She thought when she grew up she would become a giraffe, and her brother a dog. I told her I hoped to
