A Crow on Dundas Street | The Torrance Gallery Sunday Journals — No. 22

Last week, while we were hanging Jane Kitching’s Common Ground, the familiar sounds of ladders, measuring tapes and the occasional debate over whether a painting should move half an inch to the left were interrupted by a very vocal crow outside the gallery. It seemed determined to make itself heard. Then, almost as if she had been summoned, a woman appeared and began tossing them monkey nuts—peanuts still in their shells.

The crow clearly knew what to do. Holding a nut beneath one foot, it opened the shell with remarkable dexterity and ate the prize inside. There was nothing clumsy or tentative about it; this was a practised routine. We began talking to the woman, who told us that, as a girl growing up in Eastern Europe, she had cared for an injured crow. That early encounter began a lifelong connection with these birds. Watching her with our Dundas Street crow, it was clear that the affinity had never left her.

Crows are, of course, exceptionally intelligent. Members of the corvid family—which also includes ravens, rooks, jackdaws and magpies—they can solve complex problems, use tools and learn from one another. Studies have shown that crows can recognise individual human faces and remember people associated with danger for years. Their intelligence is social as well as practical. They observe us, distinguish between friend and threat and communicate what they have learned to other crows. The woman’s story therefore made a certain intuitive sense: to a crow, a particular person can become part of its remembered world.

Perhaps this intelligence is also why artists return to crows and ravens so often. Their dark silhouettes are immediately recognisable, but they never feel anonymous. There is always the suggestion of an individual character looking back at us—watchful, resourceful and perhaps quietly assessing the situation.

We currently have three very different interpretations of these remarkable birds in the gallery.

Pamela Grace’s Raggedy Crows finds affection and humour in their slightly dishevelled appearance. They feel less like ominous symbols and more like familiar neighbourhood characters.

In Stuart Nicol’s acrylic Raven, the solitary bird has a stronger, more imposing presence. Ravens belong to the same highly intelligent family, but their larger scale and deep association with myth and folklore give them a rather different atmosphere.

Joyce Gunn Cairn's Crow is a limited editioned screenprint. Joyce’s lifelong fascination with sentient life is evident in the work: the bird is not simply observed as a subject, but treated as a creature with its own presence and interior world.Our unexpected visitor made all three works feel newly alive. Once you have watched a crow carefully engineer its way into a monkey nut—or heard how one wounded bird inspired an attachment lasting a lifetime—it becomes difficult to see them as simply birds in the street.

They are neighbours, observers, problem-solvers and rememberers. And, when treated with kindness, perhaps companions too.