{You're invited. (Please, click to enlarge and print.)}
Preen your feathers, my friends, for you are invited to the launch of
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
Polish those beaks until they reflect the sky above, dust down your feathered fronts, abandon the perch for one spring night and come along, do. I hope to see you there.
These two works, both the unique state artists’ book and its smaller printed companion, have been a long time in the making and I can attest to their soft and beautiful detail. I have seen the process take form before my very eyes, from initial planning and preparatory study to the drawing of and printing of twelve Southern Hemisphere birds. I have seen robust Kakapos laboured over, and house mice given fine pearly pink ears. There on the drawing board on the lounge room’s floor, I have seen kelp ribbons rendered green and wasps dipped a golden honey in hue. I have seen pencils worn down to stubs, and a body near broken in the process of work, work, endless, glorious, hunched-over, have-it-no-other-way work. 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. As the work nears completion, the pace has impossibly quickened. Birds swoop freely about the room sporting newly coloured purple crowns as others await their turn.
So do please come along and help Louise celebrate a tremendous feathered body of work. (Did I mention that there will be terrific catering?)
{From top to bottom, a Superb Fruit-Dove (Ptilinopus superbus), a Rufous Hornero (Furnarius rufus), a pair of Southern Boobooks (Ninox novaeseelandiae), a Grey-rumped Treeswift (Hemiprocne longipennis), and a Red Knot (Calidris canutus).}
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?
