Falcon Hoods

Falcon Hoods is a sculptural series based on the leather hoods traditionally used to cover birds of prey while resting between flights. Drawing on the visual language of falconry — a practice historically associated with aristocratic leisure, territorial control, and spectacle — Cibic transforms these functional objects into autonomous sculptural forms that examine the relationship between display, desire, and systems of cultural value.

Each hood is hand-crafted and individually painted with representations of twentieth-century artist-designed stools, tables, and modernist furniture forms that have themselves entered museum collections and acquired the status of cultural artefacts. By overlaying one display apparatus onto another, Cibic constructs a layered economy of spectatorship in which luxury objects, collectible design, hunting culture, and modernist aesthetics become intertwined.

The work interrogates the mechanisms through which objects acquire symbolic and economic value. Removed from their utilitarian function, the falcon hoods operate as fetishised stand-ins for absent bodies — traces of the bird of prey that never physically appears. The object of desire remains permanently displaced, accessible only through its attributes, accessories, and systems of representation.

Through this deliberate absence, Falcon Hoods exposes the structures that organise perception within systems of collecting and display. Whether shaped by market forces, institutional framing, political ideology, or personal taste, the meaning of the object emerges not from the object itself but from the cultural apparatus surrounding it. The museum, the collection, the hunt, and the artwork all become overlapping stages upon which value is continuously performed and reproduced.

Positioned between sculpture, design object, and ceremonial artefact, the series reflects on the fetishisation of both art and experience within contemporary culture. By withholding the “real” object — the bird itself — Cibic redirects attention toward the ideological and aesthetic frameworks through which desire, authenticity, and prestige are constructed.