ELSEWHERE

Feathery quartet

Here, photographed at Geelong Gallery on the day we deinstalled our show All breathing in heaven, is Gracia with a bound and finished copy of my artists' book A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds in hand. You can see the hand-coloured feathers of May's Southern Boobook (Ninox novaeseelandiae), June's Grey-rumped Treeswift (Hemiprocne longipennis), July's Kakapo (Strigops habroptilus), and August's Red Knot (Calidris canutus).

And here is G's explorer's narrative for this feathery quartet. Enjoy!

MAY
Southern Boobook (Ninox novaeseelandiae)

SUNDAY 19th
10.15 PM

Tiny little Ninox novaeseelandiae of mainland Australia, Tasmania, and the coastal islands. Tiny little Ninox novaeseelandiae, lover of the open desert and the dense forest. Why, you’ve charmed your way into May placement. Sighted nesting in a tree hollow one night, I fell that hook, that line, that sinker, for your great big eyes and your small frame. Though your love of the rodent as delicacy is one I cannot with my palette come to appreciate, I admire you all the same. You talk to me of their paper fine ears tasting like the finest morsel and I find myself wincing ever so slightly. But no love was ever smooth in her course, and so I find myself both drawn closer and repelled. Caught in your talons, a small grey tail and I think of childhood tales (of Anatole the mouse with the expert knowledge of cheese, and Ratty and his beloved riverbank). And so, my handsome little tiny Ninox novaeseelandiae I will draw your portrait with you and your young encircled by a ring of mice. A mischief of mice for the two of you, only please, pray, make their demise swift. (In writing this love missive to a Boobook I realize that the winter isolation is already taking its toll. I am metamorphosing into a true Twitcher before your very eyes. My mannerisms have quite altered, and I fear all forms of normal society may well be closed to me forever now. But what for that cared the besotted, mania-bitten. What indeed.)


JUNE
Grey-rumped Treeswift (Hemiprocne longipennis)

TUESDAY 11th
3.30 PM

In a mangrove forest in the Malay Peninsula, I spot the easily detectable Grey-rumped Treeswift from a distance. The tail is like a pair of long-bladed scissors, and the inclement weather is on my side. As they perch on the twigs for a rest, showing me same cheek as Gould, I draw the portrait of this non-migrant. For their generosity, a halo of butterflies (Rajah Brooke’s Birdwing (Trogonoptera brookiana), Common Lascar (Pantoporia hordonia hordonia), The Wizard (Rhinopalpa polynice), Wavy Maplet (Chersonesia rahria), Horsfield’s Baron (Tanaecia iapis)). My fascination with birds has struck me quite late and J. Ruskin’s lament, when he mulled over a life he deemed 'wasted' on mineralogy, echoes my own wilderness steps: "Had I devoted myself to birds, their life and plumage, I might have produced something worth doing."


JULY
Kakapo (Strigops habroptilus)

MONDAY into TUESDAY 22nd / 23rd
1.40 AM

My first meeting with a Kakapo on Codfish Island (Whenua Hou), New Zealand was as befits this marvelously robust flightless bird, most fitting. It bowled me over one night as it clambered about. Took me by terrific surprise. The ambush! Bewilderment! There was I stumbling in the dark on the forest floor looking for one when one found me. Many may describe such a flightless bird as being ridiculous and stocky, but I can assure you it was I who felt ridiculous and cumbersome as I fell face forward. If one of us was to look the lumbering goose it was not the rampaging Strigops habroptilus en route to create a performance arena to woo a female. All the nightlong I could hear its subsonic mating boom. July’s portrait to scale thus drawn from memory. It’s giant claws looked like tree roots, its focus was intent, and even in night’s cloak, its feathers a most luminous green and yellow.


AUGUST
Red Knot (Calidris canutus)

THURSDAY 8th
Near to 11 AM

As we pass the halfway point of the year, if I thought for but a moment that my to-ing and fro-ing in search of particular birds was of immense proportions, a cursory glance at the annual flight patterns of the Red Knot soon returned my head to right proportion. Now at the south east Gulf of Carpentaria, I await their arrival. Made up of many subspecies (the nominate subspecies Calidris canutus breeds in the Taymyr Peninsula and in central- north Siberia, for example, whilst the subspecies C. rogersi breeds in north-east Siberia; the subspecies C. roselaari breeds at Wrangel Island, Siberia, and north-west Alaska; subspecies rufa breeds in the Canadian Arctic; and subspecies C. islandica breeds on the islands of the Canadian high Arctic and northern Greenland. Have I lost you yet, dear reader, to the factual whirl of the fan?) Beholden to the mudflats, sandflats, estuaries, bays and inlets, lagoon and harbours, to sight a Red Knot I know where to look. I know too of the food they fancy, and so as I wait, I prepare gastropods, crustaceans and echinoderms. Worms, and bivalves too. And with too much time on my hands, I have arranged my gastropods and worms so as to spell out the word ‘Welcome’ on the sandy beach. Fearing they may mock my sign or deem it too much, I flip my prearranged crustaceans over and reshuffle my bivalves until the arrangement now loosely resembles the words 'Eco' and 'Mewl'. Though upon reflection, perhaps now this merely renders me foolish. Of all those in the animal kingdom, surely it is humans who are by far the most ridiculous. I wait for the Red Knots like a nervous host unsure anyone will come, the mangled words of Nietzsche in my ear: "I fear the animals regard man as a being like themselves, seriously endangered by the loss of sound animal understanding; they regard him perhaps as the absurd animal, the laughing animal, the crying animal, the unfortunate animal."

 

In the background:
STUDIO SUMMERS
established Rome, Italy, 1869-1901
Charles F Summers (sculptor)
Australian 1858-1945; living and working in Italy 1867-1901
Figure of Ruth, seated on a rock 1890
marble
Gift of David and Berna Hume Family through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program, 2009
Geelong Gallery

A book in the library

Last Wednesday night, my unique state artists' book, A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds, and its companion, A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds, a concertina bound, hand-coloured artists’ book of smaller scale, and an edition of ten, were on display in the Leigh Scott Room of the Baillieu Library at Melbourne University. A year-long project came to a beautiful end on a rainy spring night, as these photos by G, my Dad, Elaine, and Jackie Kerin show.

The night went swimmingly, and for me passed in a mad whirl, which you can read about in G's recent post, A very fine launch in the Southern Hemisphere (along with an additional selection of launch photos).

Thank-you to all those who came along to see the work and to help me celebrate. A big feathered thank-you to my Mum who worked on the bar; Elaine and G who baked all those sweet and savoury biscuits; Peter on the zine stall; my Dad for being an extra hand; Susan Millard for being a great host and allowing me run of such a great space; and writer and curator, John Kean. You can read John's launch speech here, and take yourself back in time to Wednesday night.

I am delighted to announce that A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds has been purchased by the State Library of New South Wales alongside an edition of A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds. My Dad is currently making a wooden crate for its transportation by art courier later in the week. Further hand-coloured copies of A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds are also destined for the collections of Melbourne University Library and the State Library of Victoria.

In the lead-up to an artists' book launch

From the last three days in the gallery, to these past three days, this is how the work pre-Wednesday's book launch has looked. Gracia has slowly and steadily handwritten her explorer's narrative into A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds over two long days and I loved watching the process unfold on a large drawing board in the lounge room. I saw all of my bird notes, compositional planning and artsts' book hopes come together and I was delighted. This project has been, as G's December Field Notes for the Shaft-tailed Whydah (Vidua regia) describe: "challenging, creative, rough, inspired, illuminating. I’ve darted from place to place in twelve-month span to the sounds of chord tinkling bird call. I’ve made myself a study of wanderlust unrestrained! A dream of flying near a reality!"

Especially for Wednesday's launch at the library, we'll have a spread of homemade biscuits. The Jam Drops and Lemon Hearts above will whet your appetite, I'm sure, and were baked today by G and her Mum, Elaine. And we'll also have a selection of our most recent zines available for a leaf through and to purchase on the night too, including G's newest Dear You number with a fetching striped spine, A Postcard as a Measuring Device, which I am looking forward to sharing with you in greater detail soon.

Hope to see you there, should you be free.



On the last page of A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds, alongside the artists' book's particulars you will find the following thank-you. It seems only fitting to share it here too.

Thank-you to Gracia Haby for her patience, compositional advice, research assistance, and of course, for sending me to Borneo and beyond in her imaginative explorer's narrative.

Thank-you to Susan and John Jennison, and Elaine and Peter Haby for their combined support, advice, and enthusiasm throughout all parts of making this artists' book.

No longer all breathing in heaven

As I put the finishing touches on my unique state work, A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds, in readiness for its launch on Wednesday the 23rd, it seems fitting to close our show at Geelong Gallery with this handful of photos from Monday's deinstall. As Gracia recently posted, it was a beautifully sad experience to take this work down. We could quite happily have left our work up for another two months.

But in saying that, it is true that I am so looking forward to the new work that we feel encouraged to make on the back of such a positive experience. The best way to combat the post-exhibition blues is to keep working, and I am already thinking of the next artists' book I want to make.

A medium sized bird with a wingspan equal to that of a 30cm ruler

Yesterday, Gracia took down her postcard collages, Stephen, his photographs, and I, my Northern Hawk-owls, Turquoise Parrots, and Pink-footed Shearwaters, but before I go into detail, let's pretend it is still on. With my birds serving as a backdrop, here is a look at A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds. Here you can see the Crested Jay (Platylophus galericulatus) on the left and the Yellow-fronted Woodpecker (Melanerpes flavifrons) on the right. One of the exciting things about this Year of Birds project of mine is that Gracia has written an explorer's narrative to feature in the unique state work, A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds. And here, below, your very first taste.

JANUARY
Yellow-billed Kingfisher (Syma torotoro)

WEDNESDAY 16th
1.50 PM

As I sit here concealed by leafy tropical canopy in Lae, a remote part of Papua New Guinea, I am thinking that my hastily formed idea might just be a little mad and most decidedly ill formed. When we spoke at Christmas of our plans for the forthcoming year, little did I imagine myself actually acting upon them, yet here I am, explorers hat on my crown, awaiting sighting of the Yellow-bellied Kingfisher*. There are worse ways to spend one’s January, and, some would rightly argue, there are better ways to spend one’s January, and, there is, it transpires, my way to spend the first month of the year, with binoculars pressed to nose bridge, ears on alert for the whistling trill of the Kingfisher. A medium sized bird with a wingspan equal to that of a 30cm ruler, they are apparently quite common both the local guides and printed guidebooks assure me, though my experience seems thus far to be the exception to the rule. The long hot days of summer draw me a cantankerous figure (this, the ill formed part to my plan I earlier referenced), and I wonder if I will be able to manipulate the mantle of Twitcher to fit my shape. The mosquitoes are holding a wedding party on my right leg and a conference on my left, and on my forearms, their local government is in session. I am being bitten, pricked, and drained, and all in name of cataloguing twelve southern hemisphere birds, one for each month of the year. I wait, pencil in hand, ready to draw for you this stocky little bird whose very sighting will turn my seasonal rancour on its head. (The Kingfisher is known to favour feasting upon large insects, earthworms and lizards so am draping them about my person. Is a lure to cheat?)

* Drawn here surrounded by a ring of termites. It is in the abandoned chambers created by arboreal termites that the Kingfisher makes its nest, laying between 3 to 4 eggs.

Come along to the opening next Wednesday night to read and see more.

(Many thanks to all the staff at Geelong Gallery for making our recent show so very wonderful, and for allowing G and me to take a couple of photos in the beautiful space.)

Last three days in the gallery

As Gracia recently posted, you've only a handful of days remaining to catch our exhibition with Stephen Wickham at Geelong Gallery. My birds have held their position on the gallery wall for as long as they can, barely moving a muscle or a feather, and it is time to take it all down on Monday. So I hope that you can make it to the gallery before then to see Gracia's 464 postcard collages and swim through Stephen's from Rock bottom, but beautiful by way of Tangles and charms fallen into the life lost to Plasma and lapis skies. Skates on, troops. You've only three days.

We'll be sorry to pack this up, but we're also looking forward to making new work. And what fun we've had these past few weeks. Thank-you.

















Gracia Haby, Louise Jennison, Stephen Wickham
All breathing in heaven
Until Sunday 13th of October, 2013
Geelong region artists program
Geelong Gallery, Little Malop Street, Geelong


(Geelong Gallery's recent e-newsletter featuring Gracia's Wet whiskers drying postcard collage on the cover of October's Art Almanac. Click to enlarge.)

Parrots, Cinderella, and a woodland glade

It'll come as no surprise when I tell you that I still have my head buried working on the handcolouring and binding element of five (of the ten) editions of A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds, and as the launch at the library draws nearer, I grow more excited and nervous. I hope those of you nearby can come along to the launch and see with your own eyes the parrots and swifts I've been labouring over.

In my focus, I've yet to share with you Gracia's two brilliant written responses to The Australian Ballet's two-act ballet La Sylphide performed alongside the one-act Paquita, and Alexei Ratmansky's world premiere of the dreamy Cinderella. First things first, here, Gracia takes you to a woodland glade:

La Sylphide (1836), with Paquita (1847) (for Fjord Review)
Seeing this work recently performed by The Australian Ballet as a double bill with Marius Petipa’s Paquita serving as an irresistible 19th-century classicism appetiser, is like discovering a much sort after time machine. Both works feel so of their time that to see them is to feel transported to a theatre in the 1800s. This sensation comes from the choreography, from the way it uses the body, what it asks of the body, and from the emphasis upon the rapid feet movements in La Sylphide, a two act ballet synonymous with putting the dancers en pointe without the aid of overhead wires and ‘flying machines’. In La Sylphide we see memory of the first sylph Marie Taglioni, who, as Artistic Director David McAllister explained “used her incredible ability to balance on her toes for the first time in this work. The illusion of barely touching the floor, hovering on the tips of her toes, gave Taglioni a weightlessness that removed her from the earthly realm and enabled her to inhabit the role of the woodland fairy she portrayed. What Taglioni began has now evolved into a technique employed by every ballerina.”

In seeing these two works, though particularly La Sylphide, I am keenly aware that a ballet can be both timeless and of its time. This for me is part of its beauty. It is beautifully of its time. It shows us clearly what ballet was at that exact period. And in showing us what ballet was in 1836, it shows us evolution of technique and style. This production of La Sylphide has been handed down by Danish ballet masters since its 1836 debut appearance thereby making it a close-to authentic and pure work, and whilst not the same version as performed by Taglioni, in Erik Bruhn’s choreography after Bournonville I like to imagine we are seeing close to what audiences saw centuries ago.

In Paquita it is easy to imagine the audience in rapturous applause as legs fly so high they could detach, and hands give impression of pushing against the resistance of water, for this work, now more commonly performed as the one-act marriage scene between Paquita and the French nobleman whose life she has saved, is a work chiefly about impressive technique over narrative. Revised by Petipa, our Paquita remains our Spanish gypsy who discovers that she is of noble blood and thus able to marry her beloved Lucien, but what holds is the detailed classicism and Spanish-styled épaulement that seeks to convey aristocratic elegance. It is this that most evokes the period and thus delights. Audiences on the two nights’ I attended, and the full dress rehearsal too, delighted in those keenly awaited 32 fouettés executed to timed perfection as much, I can only imagine, as they did many, many performances ago.

Both timeless and of its time. The landscape paintings of Théodore Gericault and John Constable, for example, embody the Romantic sensibility and as such show us today how they viewed the world. Nature is dramatic, and there is a terrific sense of melancholic reverie. Romanticism, in rejection of Enlightenment’s values placed upon reason and order, is, as Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, “a way of feeling”. And it is this “way of feeling” twinned with Bournonville’s lightness and beauty that sees us transported to liminal space between reality and dream, from farmhouse to cauldron-side and later woodland glade all by second act of La Sylphide. Nature is a great muse, and just like those dramatic paintings, it is not always the good hero who wins. There is heartache at the core of Romanticism, and one of the air and one of the earth cannot live together. And there is the grotesque, too, in Madge, the old fortuneteller serving as dramatic counter to ethereal and ultimately unattainable sylphs. Having cursed James as she is thrown out from the farmhouse for declaring that it will be his rival Gurn who will marry his intended Effie, there can be little doubt how this will end. James will end up with neither the supernatural sylph whom he is enamored of nor his fiancée Effie. A man divided between two loves, between two worlds, it is this very state of unrest and duality that we so closely associate with the Romantic period. For me this ballet is about the sad duality between the body and the soul, between reality and the unknown realm of dreams and ideas, and what it means to be human.

Click here to read the whole piece.

And now, let us join Cinderella in a surrealist landscape:

Alexei Ratmansky's Cinderella (for Fjord Review)
Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Sergei Prokofiev’s beautifully eerie time keeping score. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. A row of conical hedges transform with one rotation into metronomes. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. A dancer’s leg strikes twelve, over and over. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. A leg can swing like a pendulum, oscillating back and forth from a central point. A body has become a clock, proving Salvador Dali true: "every portrait can be transformed into living room furniture", and thus Mae West’s lips become a sofa on which to sit. The body can become an object and an object can become a body. Time and transformation are the threads that bind this new production of The Australian Ballet’s Cinderella together. True to the score, Alexei Ratmansky’s choreography coupled with Jérôme Kaplan’s costume and set design revels in this glorious sense of time being measured, and the optical illusion of surrealism whose transformative powers delight in catching you in their illusion, thus making this fairytale complete.

The passing of time, it is in the orbit of the planets that spin clockwise and anticlockwise. There flies Mars, Neptune, and Venus! It is in the apparent suspension of time that sees dancers appear weightless. Indeed, as the Celestial Bodies fly Cinderella through the solar system, she appears to defy gravity. So at ease, her suspended form calls to mind Dali’s The Sleep (1937). The very marking of time, it is the chase the orchestra perform with alacrity and apparent delight. One moment an almost demonic gallop, the next a lyrical sweep to rival the swirl of costume. It is a score perhaps not as well known as Romeo and Juliet (but it should be) and it is one that has a beautiful quality of measuring, keeping, and altering time from the moment it commences. You begin to almost see the notes leaping up from the orchestra pit and taking over the theatre. Ratmansky’s Cinderella evokes the overwhelming sensation that this is what ballet sounds like and what Prokofiev’s music looks like.

Cinderella is a beautiful collision of opposites. The grotesque plays opposite the romance of the fairytale with the happy ending we are assured of from the outset, with or without the transportation conjuring feats performed by mice and pumpkins. There can be little doubt that to bite into one of the stepsisters or the stepmother would be fatal: "sugary on the outside and venomous inside." Comedy plays opposite heartache, and real time plays opposite suspended time. It combines the timeless with the ephemeral, and the classic with the modern with all the ease of a Georgio de Chirico painting. With its ambiguous spatiality and the power to free objects from their normal contexts, the surrealist’s landscape of the unknown seems an ideal landscape in which to place Cinderella. If you are going to explore the dream, longing (both romantic and familial), and by that reasoning, the fairytale, who better to have as guide than the surrealists? Celebrating the laws of chance and a sense of different layers has the effect of hand in glove that one wonders why you’ve not earlier seen Cinderella in surreal setting such as this. From René Magritte we have the frame within a frame within a frame of the staging that works so cleverly to alter the audience’s sense of space and time. And we also have the suggestion of conflict between the hidden and the visible that runs through much of Magritte’s work echoed at the close of act II when the Prince cannot 'see' Cinderella for her rags. There but not there, I doubt I have ever been more moved by an act’s close, such is this production’s understanding of the power of drama and story telling. The story told through lengthy mime—gone. In its place, a body to speak, and speak it does in the lead up to midnight replete with its twelve chimes. In hearing the orchestra play the Waltz-Coda at the end of act II, I am generally confused as to just who is moving: the characters on stage or the whole theatre? Come Midnight hedges-cum-metronomes glide, encircle and ensnare, and Cinderella and the Prince run circles, and the audience, too—we are moving aren’t we? I am reminded of Prokofiev’s own words in describing the sense of confused, fused fantastical movement when at a young age he saw Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty at the Bolshoi Theatre: "...but when they, that is the cast in Sleeping Beauty, where moving along in a boat whilst the stage set moved toward them, your gaze, after having being glued to the spectacle for a time, involuntarily shifted and you looked around and it seemed that the theatre was also moving until finally you couldn’t tell whether it was the stage or the theatre or your own head that was moving."

Click here to read the whole piece (replete with endnotes, if you're curious).

Rereading these words, I cannot wait for The Australian Ballet's 2014 season.

'Hastings, I have had in my mind all along a certain idea.'

At last! At last! Gracia's brand new zine A Catalogue of Bodies, which was available for pre-order last week, is preparing to wing its way to new homes near and far. Thank-you for your recent orders. Your orders, alongside the remainder of the edition of 50, are spending the day drying under weight. Behind me as I draw, a tower of zines with blood-red spines.

You, too, can pick up a copy for yourself here through our online store.

At 77 double-sided pages in length, this is the biggest zine we've assembled to date, and it comes with that fetching blood-red spine I mentioned. Inside, it is filled with a host of bodies from every Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot tale starring David Suchet. It even features said beloved Belgium sleuth in a couple of screen-grabs. Expect to find bodies gathered from Evil Under the Sun, Death on the Nile, Murder in Mesopotamia, The Hollow, and the short stories too. No body has been left out. Name, Cause of Death, and Time of Death have all been slavishly recorded by G. It is quite the homage to Poirot's particularity and neatness. Many right angles and most methodical.

Enjoy it, friends.

A Catalogue of Bodies harvested from the television adaptations (1989-2014) of Agatha Christie’s stories featuring Hercule Poirot as played by David Suchet. Included in this grisly catalogue, pretend deaths (such as Magdala ‘Nick’ Buckley’s staged overdose in Peril at End House and Norma Restarick’s staged suicide in the bathtub in The Third Girl, and what appears to be Arlena Stuart’s strangled body on the beach but is actually Christine Redfern in disguise in Evil Under the Sun), suicides, deaths, and murders. In some cases, where the body is not shown, the moment just prior features, giving us Dorothy Craddock, having been earlier injected with bacteria, falling ill in Egypt in Cards on the Table; Rosaleen and Gordon Cloade just before the bomb blast in Taken at the Flood; Major Richard Knighton shown standing on the train tracks at mystery’s culmination in The Blue Train; and because both were simply too good not to include, on a newspaper in Hastings’ hands, a headline announcing Felix Bleibner’s mysterious death in The Egyptian Tomb, and Lady Muriel in the play attended by Poirot and Arthur Hastings in The Third Floor Flat.

Whilst several pretend deaths have been included, any thwarted attempts and near misses have been left out of the catalogue as they did not produce an actual body to document. For example, Nurse Hopkins’ thwarted attempt to poison Poirot (Sad Cypress), Mrs Rendell’s failed attempt to push Poirot before a train (Mrs McGinty’s Dead), Miss Phyllida Campion being “pushed down the moving stairs” (The Case of the Missing Will), and in order to throw suspicion onto others, Miss Gilchrist’s illness as a result of consuming a non-fatal, self-poisoned piece of wedding cake (After the Funeral). Deaths referred to in conversation only, such as Richard Abernethie from After the Funeral, have also not been included in this catalogue.

Next up, Miss Marple? I do hope so.

(How a zine is made.)

(The line 'Hastings, I have had in mind all along a certain idea' comes from Agatha Christie's Lord Edgware Dies.)

A launch draws nearer

You have been patiently following my progress with this 2013 project of mine so I am especially exited to share with you today and invite you to the forthcoming book launch of my unique state artists' book A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds (as shown below) and the limited edition, hand-coloured artists' book A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds. I hope you will be able to join me at the University of Melbourne's Baillieau Library on the 23rd of October to see these works with your very own eyes.

An invitation to view 
A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds
A unique state artists’ book

&
A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds
Single-colour lithographic offset print with colour pencil artists’ book, edition of 10

by Louise Jennison 

Wednesday 23rd of October, 2013

6-8pm
To be opened by John Kean, writer and curator 
Leigh Scott Room, Level 1, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne 

RSVP essential by the 18th of October

 

In Louise Jennison’s A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds unique state artists’ book, twelve birds are brought together and their portraits hand-drawn for posterity. Depicted to scale, each bird, one for every month of the year, is encircled by the food it eats (the Crested Jay by a ring of wasps, the adult and juvenile Southern Boobooks by a mischief of mice, the Grey-rumped Treeswift by a necklace of butterflies from Malaysia), the home it keeps (the Rufous Hornero in her dried mud nest-cum-oven, the Shaft-tailed Whydah on an Acacia branch), and the things it does (the sticks cleared by the Kakapo to make a stage from which to woo a mate). Alongside written facts and a pocket of environment drawn, these portraits in book form bring together a year’s worth of work. Housed in a Solander box made to scale of turquoise linen with an interior lined gold (to recall the wings of parrots et. al.), this work is both homage to Audubon and his ilk, and something more.  

In companion to this, A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds, a concertina bound artists’ book of smaller scale, and an edition of ten. In this edition, the portraits previous are hand-coloured by pencil, rendering the Yellow-billed Kingfisher, Red-rumped Parrot, Superb Fruit-Dove, and the Yellow-fronted Woodpecker luminous and (relatively) true.  

In both works, the bird is shown as living creature to respect and to be in awe of, and as something not so very different to ourselves. The homes we build, the lives we lead, the desires we hold, the foods we eat, the patterns we form, the knowledge we hold, and our means to survive: are not we all more similar than not?











"I have listened to owls hoot, parrots woo, and doves digest. The whole house is but a giant (paper) aviary, and it is and has been glorious." (Thanks, G. xo)

Three spoons of sugar

Rescued from my leaky letterbox, one copy of Spoonful: A Happiness Companion, Issue 09, which features two birds perhaps preparing to sample the sugary confection before them. Perhaps they already have as the Blue-crowned Hanging Parrot (Coriculus galgulus) has already turned a most unnatural shade of rose. The normally 'glittering plumage' of the Giant hummingbird (Patagonia gigas) looks a little peaky too.

Hummingbirds were close to John Gould’s heart and in 1857 he saw his first live hummingbirds when he journeyed to America 'With what delight did I examine its tiny body, and feast my eyes on its glittering plumage'. Gould returned from this short trip to America with two live hummingbirds but sadly, despite his best efforts to keep them alive on a special diet of nectar and insects, they did not survive the voyage.
(Source: ZSL Living Conservation's Artefact of the month, August 2007 post about Calliphlox amethystina, the amethyst hummingbird in Volume III of A monograph of the Trochilidae, or family of humming-birds, by John Gould. London : published by the author, 1849-61 in five volumes plus supplement.)

Thank-you, Anthea, for inviting me to be a part of Spoonful. I enjoyed coming up with a fantastical cake for your Sweetness issue.



Sarah Andreacchio, Sharon Hinchcliffe, Jenika Rivera, Rebecca Gould, Heliana Rotariu, Sandra Monat, Stephanie Ginger, Annick Gaudrealult, Marika Paz, and Marie Gardeski also created cakes for the spread, Objects of Affection, in which artists were asked to create a multi-tiered cake.

You can purchase a copy of Spoonful, issue 9, here.