Fossilized Creatures

 

The Cirrus Flock is an ongoing project that, since 2013, has developed into a growing family of so-called “cloud creatures.” These hybrid beings are constructed from found polystyrene, displaced by wind and water, and fitted with disposable wooden forks as legs. Several successive generations exist, each remaining connected to the location where its material was found, such as the Wadden Sea near Texel, Irish beaches, or the inner city of Groningen.

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Davids approaches polystyrene — a man-made material that is virtually non-biodegradable — as a form of contemporary sediment and as the foundation for a fictional ecology. Within the project, scale, time, and transformation play a central role: creatures are enlarged, generations evolve under artificial light, and their encounters are documented through stop-motion animation.

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In 2017, the first cloud creature were fossilized by casting them in bronze, transforming the fragile and lightweight material into a durable form. This transition from the temporary to the permanent connects to Davids’ broader investigation into value, permanence, and the attribution of lasting meaning to discarded materials. The Cirrus Flock thus functions as a form of speculative archaeology, in which contemporary waste is interpreted archaeological findings of fossils of a future world.