Flown & Fought - Eva Bouzard-Hui, c. 2001

Eva Bouzard-Hui constructs Flown & Fought as a vertically compressed assembly of human faces, birdlike creatures, botanical forms, and a large diagonal structure that passes through nearly the entire composition. Although the work is executed primarily through spare black line, its imagery is dense. Every form appears to overlap another, creating a visual condition in which flight, struggle, memory, and bodily endurance cannot be neatly separated.

The principal face occupies the upper-left portion of the central grouping. Its eyes look outward with a guarded, somewhat weary expression, while small marks across the cheeks and forehead give the face an unsettled surface. Bouzard-Hui does not isolate it as a conventional portrait. The head is pressed against surrounding patterns, birds, and the diagonal form crossing the sheet, making psychological identity inseparable from the structure being carried.

That diagonal structure is the work’s most commanding formal element. Built from several broad parallel bands and smaller areas of crosshatching, it resembles a bundled object emerging from a pot or bag held across the body. Its identity remains uncertain because Bouzard-Hui does not make it exceptionally clear.

As a nest, it belongs to the title’s idea of having “flown.” Its repeated bands can be read as gathered branches, suggesting that the human figure has acquired or carried the anatomy necessary for home. However, rather than comforting the figure effortlessly, it appears to press across them. Home becomes something that must be borne.

As an architectural structure, it suggests ascent. The bands offer a route upward toward the birdlike forms gathering near the top. But this path is tilted, interrupted, and tangled with bodies. Bouzard-Hui therefore turns upward movement into effort rather than release. Advancement occurs through strain.

This duality lies at the heart of the title. Flown & Fought joins two completed actions. The work is not titled Flying and Fighting, which would locate the figures in ongoing activity. “Flown” and “fought” suggest that both experiences have already occurred. The image exists afterward in the past tense, when the body is left to carry their consequences.

The ampersand is equally important. Flight and conflict are not offered as opposites connected by “but.” They are joined by “and.” One may have flown because one fought, fought in order to fly, or discovered that freedom itself required struggle. Bouzard-Hui refuses to establish which action came first.

Above the central face, several birdlike heads appear in a compressed cluster. One has a rounded head and prominent beaklike profile like a parrot; another is defined through feathers, pointed forms, and a sharply turned gaze. They seem perched upon or entangled with the diagonal structure rather than freely soaring through open space.

Their placement makes them ambiguous emblems of flight. They possess the physical characteristics associated with freedom, but they remain crowded together within the composition. Bouzard-Hui’s birds rarely function as uncomplicated symbols. Their ability to fly may promise escape, but their circumstances repeatedly introduce vulnerability.

Across her catalog, birds are caught, held, directed toward destinations, perched above human relationships, or used to represent perspectives inaccessible to the grounded body. In Caught, flight is contradicted by a trap-like environment. In Destination Pin Point, birds suggest numerous possible routes while one is brought into the hand. In World Trade Feelings, the monumental bird occupies an elevated realm associated with daring and imagined freedom.

In Flown & Fought, the birds seem marked by what they have survived. They are not suspended in a luminous spring atmosphere or shown passing easily across an open sky. They gather within the same dense visual structure as the human figures. Flight has not removed them from struggle.

A second major hint at intention appears near the bottom. A heart sits at the bottom of the figure's lap, crumbling at its base.This is the work’s most inward and physically broken presence. Perhaps love was fought for and this is the end result. The heart's position beneath the other figures gives it the character of a foundation. The upper figure, bundled structure, birds, and botanical forms appear to rest upon it. Its diminished condition may therefore represent the experiences it bore, which were announced in the title—love left beneath everything that has flown and fought.

Bouzard-Hui often organizes emotional relationships through physical stacking. Faces appear beneath vessels, figures inhabit one another, and bodies become platforms upon which other creatures gather. In Come Nest on Me, one figure explicitly invites smaller beings to occupy its body. In Fullness Complaints, a pitcher supports an overflowing population of symbols. Here, the lower face appears to carry an entire history above it.

This stacking suggests that survival is cumulative. The work does not depict one isolated conflict or flight. Each event leaves another form upon the body: a bird, a structure, a face, a branch, a weight. Bouzard-Hui makes memory architectural. The plant forms threading through the composition offer a quieter counterforce. A narrow stem rises beside the diagonal bands, dotted with rounded buds or berries. Additional leaflike and pod-shaped forms appear around the lower head and near the right edge. These botanical elements are modest compared with the large structure, but their persistence is meaningful.

Flowers and plants throughout Bouzard-Hui’s practice often complicate emotional states rather than simply decorating them. They may signify renewal, sacrifice, grief, frustrated hope, or the continuity of nature despite human suffering. In Flown & Fought, the plants appear to grow through the aftermath. They neither erase the conflict nor transform the image into a scene of uncomplicated recovery. Their stems are thin, and their small buds appear vulnerable. Yet they continue upward. Growth occurs alongside exhaustion.

The work’s handmade paper intensifies this interpretation. Its surface is visibly fibrous and irregular, with rough edges and scattered inclusions. Rather than presenting Bouzard-Hui’s drawing upon a perfectly smooth ground, the paper interrupts and absorbs the line. The image seems embedded within a material that has already undergone tearing, pulping, compression, and reformation.

Handmade paper is especially appropriate for a work concerned with survival after struggle. The material itself is formed through transformation. Fibers are broken down and reassembled into a new sheet. The support therefore participates conceptually in the title: it has been processed, altered, and made whole enough to carry another image.

Small metallic and silver-toned fragments catch the light in several areas. These inclusions give the otherwise subdued work brief flashes of brightness and bring unexpected illumination. Because they are embedded within the rough paper rather than painted as conventional highlights, these metallic traces feel discovered rather than imposed. Bouzard-Hui allows beauty to arise from the material’s irregularity. What appears damaged or worn also contains reflective surfaces.

The nearly monochrome drawing distinguishes Flown & Fought from many of her brightly colored works. Without saturated yellow, blue, green, or red to organize emotional emphasis, the viewer must attend to density, repetition, and the pressure of line. Black marks gather around faces, feathers, and the central structure, while other contours fade almost completely into the paper.

This uneven visibility creates the sensation of memory. Some parts of the experience remain sharply defined; others have become faint, worn, or difficult to reconstruct. The title names what happened, but the image presents only fragments of how it felt.

The drawing also possesses an almost print-like quality. Fine outlines, crosshatched areas, and interrupted black passages recall etching or drypoint, even as the handmade paper and hand-drawn irregularities preserve its intimacy. This gives the work the appearance of a personal emblem or privately printed page from a larger emotional narrative.

The vertical arrangement may also be read as a kind of improvised monument. Traditional monuments elevate heroic figures above stable bases, presenting conflict as something conclusively overcome. Bouzard-Hui’s monument is unstable. Its figures lean, its birds crowd together, its supporting heart bows, and its architectural element doubles as a burden. There is no singular victor. The title does not say who flew, who fought, or whether they were the same being. Bouzard-Hui replaces heroic certainty with accumulated survival.

The date, May 18, 2001, places the work at a year into the new decade and millennium. What can be said from the work is that Bouzard-Hui had by then developed a highly personal symbolic vocabulary capable of condensing animals, faces, plants, architecture, and emotional language into one interconnected structure. Compared with the more brightly colored and expansive animal ecologies of the late 1980s, Flown & Fought feels pared down and reflective. The earlier exuberance of Horse, Kitty, and Me or Ride on Sea Turtle has given way to a more austere reckoning with what movement and attachment cost.

Yet the recurring motifs remain. Birds still represent the possibility of reaching another state. Plants still continue despite emotional difficulty. Bodies still become structures for carrying others. Bouzard-Hui’s visual vocabulary has not disappeared; it has been stripped to its resilient framework. The work’s emotional force ultimately comes from its refusal to separate freedom from struggle. Flight is usually imagined as release from weight, while fighting is associated with direct bodily resistance. Bouzard-Hui combines them in a composition where possessions resemble burdens and structures resemble paths.

To have flown may mean having escaped. It may also mean having been uprooted, forced away, or left suspended without support. To have fought may mean having resisted danger, but also having accumulated exhaustion. The title preserves both the pride and cost of these completed actions. 

Flown & Fought therefore reads less as a scene of victory than as a portrait of endurance after motion. It is the Eva Bouzard-Hui visualization of flight or fight. The figures remain present, though altered. The birds have not vanished into the sky. The plants have not stopped growing. The bowed face continues to carry the structure above it.

Bouzard-Hui suggests that survival is not always announced through uplifted posture or triumphant color. Sometimes it appears as a fragile handmade sheet, a lowered heart, a few persistent buds, and the recognition that one has already flown, already fought—and is still here to bear the marks of both.