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)
