This show is for the birds
Birdland, at the Carnegie Gallery, brings together the creations of three artists: Kathy Renwald, Sarah Fuller and Anca Gaston
Here’s something to tweet about: an exhibition about birds.
Birdland, at the Carnegie Gallery, brings together the creations of three artists: Kathy Renwald, Sarah Fuller and Anca Gaston.
“I love birds,” says Jody Joseph, the exhibition’s curator. “They are a subject of near-universal fascination, across all cultures, throughout history, to a wide range of people — naturalists and scientists, artists, poets and novelists, mythmakers, storytellers — and anyone with a back-yard bird feeder.”
Birds and artists have had a long relationship. Some of the earliest goddesses ever depicted, more than 20,000 years ago, were bird goddesses. Birds continued to thrive in art through the ages, serving as symbols of spring, life, death, rebirth, domesticity and the soul.
The death of birds from DDT spraying led Rachel Carson to write Silent Spring in 1962. Her book was an early warning about the dangers of pesticides.
Renwald says her bird images are a response to seeing fewer birds visiting her backyard every year. And she has a bird-friendly yard.
“But around us things are changing,” she tells me. “There are fewer trees, less scrubby areas, disruption of food sources and areas of cover.”
In her wonderfully rough and bold mixed-media wall collages, she imagines birds in their own world, away from humans.
“I’ve been making images of birds for about seven years,” she says. “I sometimes make them in 3D out of cardboard.”
A black, grey and white bird in a profile pose dominates “Bird Collage #7.” The bright green ground line and pale blue backdrop suggest a landscape setting. But Renwald’s birds are far from mimetic. She says most of them “are composite birds, part Vogue and Audubon.”
Using paper, paint and fabric, Renwald builds the bird from layers of irregularly shaped pieces of paper enhanced by drawn lines. Bits of paper float around the bird. White strips made from thin fabric frame it.
Letters and numbers add decorative notes. A multicoloured fragment with tiny print floats above the bird. A white rectangle contains the numeral 5 in red.
Fuller, too, constructs her birds from paper patches. But her compositions are as spacious as Renwald’s are cluttered.
“Robin,” a predominantly brown and green bird, inhabits a white space, free from any worldly visual anchors.
The body of “Mallard” incorporates a variety of papers, including part of a black and white photograph of a human.
Fuller was inspired by a journal kept by Jim Coutts, who recorded the birds he saw on his property in southern Alberta in the early 20th century. Fuller found contemporary books and magazines, took images from them to fashion her birds and then digitally reproduced them.
Of the three artists, it is Gaston whose avians look the most lifelike. That’s because she takes photographs of her subjects, hiding and waiting patiently and quietly for them to appear. She focuses on both common and less familiar species in southern Ontario.
“Lesser Yellowlegs at Sunset,” she says, is a bird seen here only in spring and autumn. Gaston captures this bird in a moment of movement. It has lowered its head and touches the golden water with its beak. This movement just happens to create a reflection that looks as though two birds have united in a circle.
Gaston also draws attention to the ornately dappled plumage by balancing it with the background, which is dappled with indigo.
Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@thespec.com Special to The Hamilton Spectator