Birds, we’re curious fans
Bird’s Eye View: Perspectives on the Art and Science of Ornithology
Presented as part of Melbourne Rare Book Week
Museum Theatre, Melbourne Museum
Saturday 20th July, 2024
In preparation for Saturday’s sold out panel at the Melbourne Museum, Bird’s Eye View: Perspectives on the Art and Science of Ornithology, as part of Melbourne Rare Book Week, with Dr Karen Rowe, Curator of Birds, Museums Victoria, and Rebecca Carland, Senior Curator, History of Collections & Scientific Art, Museums Victoria, moderated by John Kean, whose publications include The art of science: remarkable natural history illustrations from Museum Victoria, 2013 and Dot Circle and Frame: the making of Papunya Tula art, 2023, we thought a great deal about birds and our understanding of them. Historically, humans have used animals, in particular birds, to lay out our ideas and hopes, as a symbol of freedom, and beauty to treasure.
Birds, for us, we learn by either a sound heard or a sight caught upon a walk, and we know them by our own description: small, like a leaf; chimes, like a bell. We also know them by illustrations in collections, like Melbourne Museum, NGV, SLV, and similar, on the page, gazing left or right, or, in the case of a Silvestor Diggles’s owl, face forward, looking right at you, perhaps rendering you a tasty rodent-reader. Our growing awareness of birds and their brilliance is one which weaves the walking with the page-turning. For us, it is one where the Latin resides inside a pair of rounded brackets.
We are drawn to the descriptive names they wear, ruby-throated, yellow-crowned, blue-winged, green-crested, purple-banded, grey-rumped, scarlet-tufted, laughing.
We are drawn to the roles they play and their particular environmental adaptations. The brushed tongues of Honeyeaters that enable them to extract nectar from eucalypt flowers. Shaggy feathers as a cooling mechanism: hello Southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius). The ingenious mimicry of the Superb lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae) instantly leaps to mind. We love seeing the smaller birds that return to an area when understorey planting is restored.
In some of our artists’ books and prints, we have made a 2D version of museum habitat dioramas that, we believe, meld both science and art, in a bid to say: would you look at what surrounds us. Equally, would you look at the litany of the mistakes we humans have made, and what that might tell us about ourselves.
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Looking for green, remaining hopeful, 2024, artists’ book, photographed by Tim Gresham
To counter our role as ‘plume hunters’ in the collection, representing nature for beauty’s sake alone is not something we are interested in, and, to us, it would feel like a continuation of the human tradition of taking from or treating nature as a resource. Art, as we all know, can advance social causes. It can help us question our perceptions and our disconnection to the environment or nature. On the precipice of extinction, it should make us think. Question our role, our footfall. See something from the view of another vantage point, another species, another way of existing in the world. As Ros Crisp comments on her dance opening a window, in our artists’ books, and all our work, we are trying to open a window, or a doorway, for the reader, or the viewer, to choose to leap, peer, or step through. Art is our way to inspire action. But we don’t want to beat the viewer about the brow with it; it’s up to them. (And it is also something out of our control, how a work is experienced.)
As storytellers, reciprocating with nature is woven into all our work. Bracketed by light, our nocturnal artists’ book of 2022, was something of a love letter to animals, in particular, those we had cared for as wildlife carers; those whose very being we have been completely undone by. It was our salute to the living world, to those you have heard of and those perhaps you have not. And this is true of many of our artists’ books, zines, or our large-scale installations, like The remaking of things, where we have moments of joy rubbing alongside moments of error, depicting, what author Katherine Rundell describes as, how in our hunger for the living world, humans have cherished it and we have destroyed it; the greatest lie humans ever told is that the world is ours and at our disposal, and it is a lie so huge and so deep and so lasting that it has the power to kill us all. Our books are our attempt to work against that lie.
The pages, be they of paper or on the gallery wall, we hope invoke a sense of awe in you. From the historically, often unbeloved, though not to us, Grey-headed flying fox to many of the birds we have featured, their intelligence is astonishing, and their beauty is breathtaking. We posit that our way of reckoning is not the only way. The broad and rich intelligence of other species is so far from how our intelligence is formed that we struggle to fathom it. And so pointing to something outside our human intelligence, is something art can do.
We have used collections to help us grow this awe and attention and action. We have spent a lot of time in journal and rare book archives, in that vast wealth of knowledge. And with every work, it becomes more of a decision of what to leave out than what goes in. Each work, we hope, is something both big and compact. Our aim is to make people love the animals and the plants within; it is intended as a wooing. It is thanks to collections that we can then pose: whatever you do, do it with rigour, and attention to detail. For hope and attention to us are not passive. They are action. They are forward-moving. As Mary Oliver wrote, “attention is the beginning of devotion”.
In addition to art to grow hope, we have also made our home-based studio into a wildlife shelter, Tiny but Wild. And so this giving-back work and care rubs alongside our giving-back art work. The two are not separate, for us, but a whole, together. Which is not unlike the two of us, creating, as individuals, something not possible without the other. Creating a third image, through our collaboration. Looking after Grey-headed flying foxes and possums, for the main, and whomever else crops up in our urban setting that is ‘tiny’ and ‘wild’. (On a side note: we recently had the pleasure of being involved in a rescue of an Eastern barn owl (Tyto alba delicatula), and were able to see their remarkable eyes, the heart-shaped facial disc, and the impressive talons up close; to feel for the small frame of the body beneath the plumage, and note the joint recognition of the fragility and strength of what lies beneath the surface of us all. We were also able to locate their ear openings which sit with one slightly higher than the other, so that, together with the disc of the face, they can locate the precise position of their prey. Channelling sound by night, so clever! The physical, soulful encounter enabled us to both learn so much, and it would not be a surprise for a barn owl to feature more prominently in an artists’ book or similar to come.)
We have highlighted extinct species, in our work, and threatened and endangered species. (The Black-throated finch, (Poephila cincta cincta), a zine from 2020, created as part of the previous year’s Black-throated finch project, initiated by Charlotte Watson, and based on the collages of relocated finches we sent to various politicians, in response to the proposed Adani Carmichael mine in Queensland, is one such example.) We have also showcased the common, by name. And so, in our most recent artists’ book, Restoring corridors (2024), harking on, as the title suggests, the need to strengthen green corridors so biodiversity can flourish, you will find an Eastern rosella (Platycercus eximius) of Least Concern. And a Yellow rosella (Platycerus elegans flaveolus), status: stable, in Looking for green; remaining hopeful (also from 2024).
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Bracketed by light, 2022, artists’ book, photographed by Tim Gresham
Knowing we would be on the stage talking about birds, we ran a quick inventory through our artists’ books and installations, to locate the birds we have featured, over the years, and record their names.
Returning to Looking for green, remaining hopeful, you’ll also find a Golden bowerbird (Prionodura newtoniana) and a Southern boobook owl (Ninox novaeseelandiae) within the concertina folds. Further afield, a Chestnut-crowned warbler (Seicercus castaneiceps), Northern hawk-owl (Surnia ulula), Newton’s parakeet (Psittacula exsul, last recorded sighting: 14th of August, 1875), Peach-faced lovebird (Agapornis roseicollis), Common kestrel (Falco tinnunculus), and an Atlantic canary (Serinus canaria).
In The remaking of things (2023), our NGV commission, in which we created a eucalypt forest from 100 pieces within the NGV collection, for our part of Melbourne Now, last year, you’ll find Kookaburra and Cockatoo pine panels, from 1915. The divine birds of John Lewin, a Three-toe king-fisher (now known as an Azure kingfisher), Warty-face honey-sucker (now known as a Regent honeyeater), Variegated warbler (now known as a Variegated fairy-wren), Reed warbler (now known as an Australian Reed Warbler), Yellow-breasted thrush (now known as an Eastern Yellow Robin), and a White-breasted honey-sucker.
Dipping back to Bracketed by light, momentarily, you will find a female and juvenile pair of Satin bowerbirds (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus) attributed to Louisa Atkinson from Natural history and botanical drawings, ca. 1849–1872, a Tawny frogmouth (Podargus strigoides), Powerful owl (Ninox strenua), Eastern grass owl (Tyto longimembris), and a parliament of Tasmanian masked owls (Tyto novaehollandiae castanopss). There is also another Eastern yellow robin (Eopsal tria australis) upon a conical nest at dawn, and a photograph of an additional Tawny frogmouth by Rex Hazlewood from Birds, ca. 1911–1929.
In Something reverberated (2021), our artists’ book which is currently being exhibited at State Library Victoria, as part of the Inspired by the Collection display within World of the Book in the Dome Galleries, you will find a third sighting of an Eastern yellow robin (Eopsaltria australis), the ‘dawn harper’, flitting, darting, calling in the gloved green hush of Slender tree ferns, Silver wattles, and Small leaf brambles. You will also find Striated pardalotes (whose common names include: pickwick, wittachew, and chip-chip), and Spotted pardalotes (Pardalotus punctatus), those eucalyptus forest specialists, those sparks of beauty.
Inside the leaves of With wings outstretched and quivering (2021), Elizabeth Gould’s beautiful hand coloured key plates from The Birds of Australia (1840–1848) can be located, and include, the Great bowerbird (Chlamydera nuchalis), Satin bowerbird (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus), and Spotted bowerbird (Chlamydera maculata).
In 2020’s A Hemline of Sky Through Smoke, A Hemline of Forest Through Smoke, and A Hemline of Water Through Smoke series, created in response to the Black Summer bushfires 2019–2020, one of the most catastrophic fire seasons on record, you will find everything from a Blue-bellied parrot to a Great brown king’s fisher, thanks to the exquisite and characterful drawings by Sarah Stone from Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales: With Sixty-five Plates of Non Descript Animals, Birds, Lizards, Serpents, Curious Cones of Trees and Other Natural Productions). They flutter alongside a Grey heron (Egretta novaehollandiae) and a Noisy miner (Manorina melanocephala) from the sketchbook of John Cotton, in a collage revealed through literal action, for this series is perforated on the fore-edge and requires the reader to ‘take action’ to see the collage through (or after, or before) the smoke. Comprised of some 300+ layers, accessed via the digital collections of Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Rijksmuseum, these early European depictions of Australian natural history are common to our own memory bank. These hand-coloured observations of our trespass, a reflection about history and memory — from where we have come, where we are now, and where we are headed — as descendants of the colonisers.
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Restoring corridors (detail), 2024, artists’ book
A body of prints created with and for the Australian Print Workshop, as part of Anne Virgo’s French Connections project in 2018–2019, included an all-page filling Winking owl (Ninox connivens) to a wee Gouldian finch (Erythura gouldiae) in a hotel lobby, by way of a juvenile Emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae) resting their beak upon a museum specimen support.
Still in flight, at Artspace Realm, Ringwood, A weight of albatross (2018), features the Sooty (Phoebetria fusca), the Shy (Thalassarche cauta), and the Wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans), amongst others, and the manmade ocean debris they’ve ingested, which may ultimately punch a hole in their vital organs.
Within Prattle, scoop, trembling: A flutter of Australian Birds (2016), the list is longer still. A few, for taste, let’s go! Australian golden whistler (Pachycephala pectoralis), Red-backed fairy-wren (Malurus melanocephalus), Australian magpie (Cracticus tibicen) , Brown honeyeater (Lichmera indistincta), Superb fruit dove (Ptilinopus superbus), a Painted buttonquail (Turnix varius) on a garden plinth, by collage, and drawn contemplating crossing a stream to the foreground, a Wedge-tailed eagle (Aquila audax), Magnificent riflebird (Ptiloris magnificus), Yellow-rumped thornbill (Acanthiza chrysorrhoa), a Rose-crowned fruit dove (Ptilinopus regina). On she goes!
Further back still, birds have appeared alongside Salvaged Relatives in costumes for the Ballet Russes (think: In the modified costume for the Bluebird from the ballet in three acts and five scenes, The seeping princess, designed by Léon Bakst or In the modified costume for a mourner from the Choreographic poem in one act, The song of the nightingale, designed by Henri Matisse, c 1920, with a charm of hummingbirds). We could rewind further, to 2013’s A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds and A Year of Southern Hemisphere Birds, where June’s Grey-rumped treeswifts (Hemiprocne longipennis) roll into July’s startlement of Kakapos (Strigops habroptilus), but perhaps we’ll call this picture painted.
We hope our work offers a sense that it is still worth it. A sense of what being reciprocal with nature means. A blueprint for what joy looks like, and what a future could look like. This is what we are interested in. Each of us have a list of things we can do on a personal level to make the world a better place: consume less, write to your MPs, eat less meat, get involved in community planting and weeding days, sing to the choir to make the choir louder and transformation possible, switch to an ethical super fund. But this is a long list of things we already know. So, through our artwork, it is our way of saying, here’s what we can do. The subtext being, for though we are not endangered yet, we are endangering ourselves as we endanger everything. Because we are interwoven. Every loss, be it biodiversity, species, take your pick, is all of our loss.
Image credit: Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, With wings outstretched and quivering (detail), 2021, 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.
