EXHIBITION Joshua Yeldham first began painting owls deliberately, desperately, when the artist and his wife were beginning IVF. “I retreated into my creativity and in my sadness I went into the forest and that's where this strange connection happened,” Yeldham recalls, “where the owls were really loud, where I was camping in the bush.” He sketched an owl, the first of, he estimates, a hundred such works. “I was warning off the darker side of my thoughts about failure, and not being a dad, and I used the owl as a gatekeeper … just asking them, 'Please, consider us worthy to have a kid.'”
Now, 24 years and two children later, Yeldham still paints owls. Devotedly. Though these days, he reflects, the bird signifies something different: “The ability to fly…
