Bird in Hand (painting)
Bird in Hand is a 2006 painting by Ellen Gallagher. It is in Tate Modern in London. The artwork uses oil paint, ink, paper, polymer, salt and gold leaf on canvas.
The painting shows a Black, pirate-like figure with a wooden leg and long hair. The face looks unusual, and the figure wears a long coat, a belt, a puffy white shirt, and blue pants. The figure is holding a green parrot and seems to be standing underwater among seaweed and a coral reef.
Gallagher made the work in her Rotterdam studio. Tate Modern acquired it in 2007 as a gift from an anonymous donor. It was shown in 2013 during a Gallagher solo exhibition called Ellen Gallagher: AxME.
The artist has explained that the parrot in the hand has “just been caught,” and the title reflects the feeling of holding a bird too tightly.
Critics have offered ideas about its meaning. Tate Modern’s Alice Sanger sees echoes of the Atlantic slave trade from Cape Verde, where Gallagher’s father is from, and notes the salt used in the piece as a reference to salt mining there. She also suggests the image can be read as a slave who becomes a pirate. Another reviewer, Amy Dawson, describes the work’s many layers of paint, gold leaf and mixed media as intricate and part of a fantastical idea of a black Atlantis, a world tied to the descendants of enslaved people who died in the Middle Passage.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 06:39 (CET).