The Herald - The Herald Magazine
The birds and the bewitched
Display centred on our feathered friends is unmissable
SURROUNDED seabirds soon to by be cliffs filled of with eggs breeding during season, the forthcoming it is appropriate that Andy and
Peter Holden’s fascinating and unmissable exhibition Natural Selection should have taken up residence in Lerwick’s Old Anderson High School, with its views to the sea beyond.
You couldn’t have a better location for an exhibition that is centred on the “innate and inherited” characteristics of birds and, indeed, of the humans who are fascinated by them.
This multi-layered Artangel exhibition, which opened in the former Newington Library in London last year and will tour to Hospitalfield in Arbroath, Bristol and Inverness, is based on the work of artist Andy Holden, of the Grubby Mitts, and his father, the ornithologist Peter Holden, who was instrumental in enthusing young birdwatchers at the RSPB and was once Blue Peter’s resident bird expert.
In one sense, it is a story of birds and their eggs, of evolution and necessity, and of the obsessive collectors who stop at nothing to illegally take those eggs out of the birds’ nests. In another, it is a cross-species story of father and son, of knowledge passed down, in the bird world, as in our own, and the meeting point between ornithology and art.
There are museum-like displays here, of birds and their eggs and the ephemera of collecting, of criminal doings and doubly impacted failures. Such is the tale of Colin Watson, believed to be the egg collector who tried to chop down the tree in Loch Garten containing the nest of the endangered osprey in the 1980s, who died falling out of another nested tree some years later.
The exhibition is dominated by a giant wicker sculpture of a bower bird’s bower, made by Holden and his assistant, along with six students from the University of the Highlands and Islands. The natural version it emulates is small but staggering, surrounded by colourful shells, sticks, bits of plastic even, collected by the birds to impress potential mates, and a rare example in the natural world of a structure built by a species other than man purely for display.
“That’s why it’s the centrepiece here, around which the rest of the show circulates,” says the curator at Shetland Arts, Jane Matthews.
Holden, she tells me, was really taken with the space, the former hall, stage and canteen of this 1960s extension of the school – currently scheduled for demolition – all of which are interlinked by glass panels. “He loved the location in the building, the interconnectedness between the spaces, and also the fact that it is on a promontory overlooking the sea, surrounded by seabird colonies, a pristine environment.”
Matthews has noticed the engagement with school pupils, she says, because many children in Shetland spend so much time outdoors that they make strong connections with the exhibits in the show. In one of the open spaces, birds’ eggs of all descriptions, with their fascinating inked spots and squiggles, are laid out in old biscuit tins on the floor, fragile, vulnerable. They are, however, made of porcelain, intricately marked by Holden, inspired by the haul found by wildlife police when they raided the home of egg collector Matthew Gonshaw.
“He had eggs stored in tins in the back
of the wardrobe, in the attic, under the bed,” says Matthews. He is the subject, too, of one of Holden’s films. It’s oddly coincidental that the day before we speak, a rare Tengmalm’s owl, not seen on Shetland for more than 100 years, should have landed in a back garden in Tumblin, causing a flurry of obsessive bird “listers”, as Matthews tells me they are called, to charter a plane to Lerwick to visit the back garden, tick the owl off their lists and then fly out again,
“without interacting with the natural environment in which the bird was found. That’s what fascinated me,” says Matthews. “It’s not that far away from being an egg collector. Andy’s film explores the pathology of the egg collector.
“This guy, Gonshaw, is lonely and he wants a female, he says, but he’s locked into this interest in nature, fascinated by the beauty of the natural environment. He loves the eggs, and yet they’re stashed in the back of the wardrobe.” And in taking the eggs he was, of course, “killing the thing he loved”.
Matthews tells me that a fine historic egg collection was once held in the main, listed, Anderson School building, where she had originally hoped to mount the exhibition and where she hopes, in a few years, artists’ studios will be installed, to continue the building’s creative history.
It had been donated many years ago, collected many before that and was recently removed to the museum – rather appropriate, she says, the link with the porcelain eggs laid out on the floor here, and the cliffs further away, and the birds and the eggs still to come.
Natural Selection: Andy Holden and Peter Holden, Old Anderson High School, Lover’s Loan, Lerwick, Shetland, 01595 745500, www.shetlandarts.org, until March 10, Wed-Sun 11am-5pm