Lucienne Rickard has spent five weeks drawing a large-scale pencil sketch of [a] critically endangered bird. Picking up her eraser, she tells her audience, “If we don’t do something soon, this is what will happen.”
— Stephanie Eslake, The Guardian
The hardest species to remove
was the Xerces blue butterfly.
Something to do with rendering
the multiplicity of microscopic scales
that cohere, from a distance,
as a wing. A wing bordered
by a fringe of gossamer
that the artist, in the effort
for absolute accuracy, smudged
with her palm, dispersing
the graphite to better feign
the flicker of movement
Some of the animals, smeared
against the paper in the midst
of disappearance, trailed what was left
of themselves behind themselves,
dorsal fins erupted into cloudbursts
of crosshatch, blots of nothingness
stippled through the eye of a crayfish.
Nonetheless, most of the wipeout
took no time at all. The last image
that remained, a swift parrot, the artist
began to erase with a slow gash
through the feathers of the breast.
Then the artist drew a door.
Then the artist left the room.
