Its plants and flowers, its fish, birds, and monkeys, even its earth and sky cry out to us. They testify to the infinite and sacred beauty that lie within the forest, and they express the agony of loss, of death and destruction. Bishop's magical brush transforms the pathetic fallacy, the speech of nature, into an exquisite expression of the pathos of truth. Her genius is to compress into single, overpowering, complex images the tragic, unfolding story of an enchanted garden of earthly delights transformed by human ingenuity and human greed into a terrifying landscape of destruction. Two eerie skeletal avian heads hold a small banner before a red and purple image of Chico, as purple tears fall from their hollow eyes.
Leaves rain through a black void upon jagged green and yellow peaks, which themselves shed a tear.
Even fish drift through an animated aether. Yet skeletal trees tower over a pinkly ominous horizon and one barely notices that starkly bare bones protrude from a radiant form. In both we meet a resurrected Chico, surrounded by vibrant life. In one image, a purple butterfly ascends like a spirit from his head. In the other work, the spirit butterfly rises above a halo-beak, a simian peers out from the forest as if to question us, and again a fish drifts into view.