One of two new artists’ books for 2021 in process

Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
With wings outstretched and quivering
18 page concertina artists’ book, inkjet print on Canson Arches 88 310gsm, with accompanying narrative (by Gracia Haby), housed in a Solander box (by Louise Jennison) with original watercolour cover on Saunders Waterford Aquarelle 300gsm white hot-press paper
Printed by Arten
Edition of two

As With wings outstretched and quivering takes its final form on the working table, please enjoy the words which accompany the bowerbirds Great, Satin, and Spotted. With heartfelt thanks to Dr Anna Welch for proofreading the following.

Empty the room. View it from the outside in. Brick by brick. Twig by twig. At the beginning: what is there?

If I were to construct a bower: where would I begin? What piece would I put where? What piece would I first arrange? Brick by brick, a dwelling. Twig by twig, a bower. It has existed long before me. It was made for shelter, in a pattern of houses that all look like each other. One house followed the other. Row by row. Suburb by suburb. A uniform carpet of homes, when viewed overhead, but with little gentleness for what it covered in the process. Muffled beneath the concrete slabs: do the thin threads of mycelium hold? I click the ‘Satellite’ thumbnail at the bottom of the map for a bird’s eye view. I lose myself in how small I am in all of this, and how little I feel I guide.

Zoom in.

Find a dent and burrow in.

In my bower, as it currently stands, rooms branch from a passageway, affording security, shelter, and sustenance. All that is needed. An above-ground echo of the snug, self-sustainment of Kafka’s below-ground burrow: “I have made the burrow habitable, and I think it has shaped up well.”[i]

My above-ground burrow fits the first definition of the word ‘bower’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

1.
a. A dwelling, habitation, abode. In early use literal. A cottage; in later use a poetical word for ‘abode’.

Its etymology, bower, n.1
Old English búr dwelling, etc.

Frequency (in current use):

In typical modern English usage, the word ‘bower’ is a faint sound on the frequency band. Shelved alongside rewrite, nutshell, candlestick, insectivore (nouns), astrological, insolent, methylated (adjectives), sequester, cull, plop, honk, befuddle (verbs), methodically, lazily, pleasantly, al dente (adverbs). By this definition and my understanding, my bower, is cosy and full, rewritten, often, with candlesticks, somewhere, but not the elaborate kind. I join its meaning with protection, and make of it a new nest, lined with trinkets of personal meaning and regular use.

I look about me to see what blue objects a Satin bowerbird (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus) might borrow from me for their own display. All the Field Guides I’ve consulted suggest thievery, with the fallen ultraviolet-reflecting tail feathers of the Crimson rosella (Platycercus elegans) rating as the most precious item and, as such, they are frequently plucked from bower to bower. But I do not have any such feathers, nor blue milk lids in the kitchen neither; they are soy, white and forgettable to me. I do have blue pencils. Both graphites in their blue Staedtler sleeves and blue-all-the-way-through coloured pencils. Blueberries in a tiny bowl. A blue ceramic coffee press. The blue spines of books on the shelves. A blue jumper like the night sky. A blue jumper like the sky before it in the afternoon. One like a rainy day too. I don’t have many things for their bower, after all. They’re too big and useless to the bowerbird.

All the same, they are welcome to them.

It seems I have joined the first definition of ‘bower’ as a dwelling, with the fourth, in my befuddlement.

4. A structure reared by the bower-bird.
1869   H. A. Nicholson Manual of Zoology. (1880) lxvi. 625   These curious birds have the habit of building very elaborate bowers.

 These bowers are wholly independent of their nests.

I’ve been focusing on the wrong part. What if my lesson was more akin to what a bowerbird does when they create a bower. A bower to the bowerbird is not a dwelling. A bower is an avenue created which affords an optical illusion. It is fashioned, slowly, with the intention of changing the point of view of the spectator, in the cup of the bower, by directing their gaze. It is like a seat in the theatre from where you watch the performance unfold. A viewing cradle made of many upright reddish twigs, it shields a part of your vision, enabling you to focus on the stage and the considered placement of forms.

A bower is a gentle curve around you. The reddish hue, no accident, rather a means to induce chromatic adaptation[ii].

In such a hold, the Great bowerbird (Chlamydera nuchalis) can create a sense of things being smaller or larger than they actually are, by placing small objects close to the avenue entrance and larger objects farther away. A lolly wrapper, a clothes peg, a shine of worn glass, tossed to and fro. A peek around the corner. A dance. A loud ‘weeoo’ call[iii].

The bowerbird nudges a discarded plastic fork stage right. They view it from the avenue, in rehearsal. They nudge it across a little more. The better the gradient, the better the pattern. The better the pattern, the better the illusion.

I borrow from them, a shift in emphasis from collector of safe harbour trinkets to a way of focusing on the positive, maintaining hope through perspective.

Give a loud descending whistle!

This is where I’ll begin.

[i] Franz Kafka, ‘The Burrow’, The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (Shocken Books: New York, 1983), p. 325.

[ii] Laura A. Kelley and John A. Endler, (2017), ‘How do great bowerbirds construct perspective illusions?’, Royal Society Open Science, Volume 4, Issue 1, January 2017, pp. 1–10, accessed 1st July, 2021.

[ii] Jennifer Ackerman, ‘Bower’, in accompanying booklet, Genevieve Lacey and Marshall McGuire, Bower, recorded 15th–19th December, 2020, ABC Classic, 2021, compact disc.

Image credit: Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, With wings outstretched and quivering (detail), 2021, forthcoming artists’ book. The original Bowerbird collages, of which this artists’ book is a variation of, were created especially for Genevieve Lacey’s Bower. Bower was released as an album by ABC Classic on the 14th of May, 2021.