Description: John the Evangelist is often depicted as an eagle, although I took quite a wide liberty in the depiction of an eagle in this piece. John 1:1 reads: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Hence the title "The Bird is the Word." Conceptual and visual inspiration came from medieval illuminated manuscripts, The Bible, Christianity, and alter pieces. This plate is a recycled zinc plate from my undergraduate studies. It was ground, scraped, sanded, and burnished to remove most of the original etching marks, but some remained and blend with the new engraved markings. One goal was to simulate the looseness and back and forth of mark making with a pencil on paper and then erasing repeatably. This can be challenging with engraving, as once the mark is made, it must be scraped out of the metal to erase it, then new marks carved in. These heavily worked plates with marks that are both measured and chaotic, represent my inner demons, questions, and confusion around religious topics and themes.