Everyday Animisms - nests and shadows

http://migrantecologies.org/Birds-Photographs-from-Railtrack-Songmaps-Exhibition

On Sunday morning (I am still getting used to the fact that church is in the afternoon) decided to go to an art exhibition - 'Everyday Animisms', which featured two series of photographic work from the "Railtrack Songmaps" project and a series of human bird 'nests'.

The world was recovering from a storm, and everything was still and I felt compelled to move slowly and stop often.

Fragile, that's how I felt.

The art pieces in the exhibition consider ‘humans and birds, placemaking and memory in a patch of urban Singapore facing considerable social and environmental change’.

The artist is Lucy Davis, and because this show is partly a last exhibition before she moves out of Wilton Close, her house is bare, apart from a chair here and there for visitors to sit on and look at the art work, and the garlands of white jasmine that are hung over door frames, and windows and mirrors and give the entire house a sweet scent.

Even before I stepped into her house I was already entranced, by a mandala made with fallen red, pink and yellow flowers on her lawn. I took off my shoes (the old sneakers I’ve been wearing almost every day, that Mum despises because they make me look ‘messy’) and walked into her house.



In the first room on the ground floor, you are faced with black and white photographs of bird nests that Davis has made, human size, and photographed at various location along the rail tracks and demolition sites at Tanglin Halt. She called it ‘Nest Invasions’. I remember trying to weave sticks together to make a nest when I was younger, but my efforts would fall apart soon after. For some reason, looking at the nests and how raffia string, bits of  old plastic bag, twigs and leaves had all been pieced together with such balance and accuracy, I felt like part of me inside was knitting together somehow. The odd thing is I don’t even know what was torn within me, or why I was sad, but that exhibition was necessary at that moment – God guides my feet on paths only He knows.

In one room, one of the photographed nests lay on the floor. I bent down to take a closer look, and nestled inside was a real, tiny bird’s nest.



Up the stairs, there were photographs of bird-shadows – computer images of birds that were printed out, and merged with Davis’ prior experience with shadow-puppetry to make transparent puppets of these images. The images were then brought back to the sites that those birds had been seen or heard, and their shadows were cast on leaves/trees/pathways/power inlet boxes… a means of ‘rewilding’. These were meant to ‘represent the fleeting magic of birdsong or the flash of a birdwing, and the ways that such everyday interventions break through the species barrier of human cities, taking us momentarily outside of ourselves.’