The symbiotic relationship between women and birds has existed for quite a long time if the number of antique tea sets which incorporate birds in their designs are anything to go by… My personal relationship with our avian friends didn’t start until I moved to a bush block outside of Mudgee twelve years ago. Since moving here I have been surprised and delighted by the sheer number of birds and wildlife who visit our garden and our now five bird baths. My first forays into watercolour were a way of trying to identify all the various birds which I saw and photographed. It made me slow down and actually look at them, at the details, over time I started to understand the personalities of our regular visitors, so I started adding elements to try to give an clue to the personality of the bird, often involving antique porcelain, so spawned a series of tea and cakes with the locals. Working mainly from photographic references, wherever possible my own, I will draw up the disparate elements into the perfect embodiment of my concept and once the details are all laid out on my handmade paper, I then start painting. I use many reference photographs in the creation of a single image, so I think of my works as painted collages.
In this series for the A Nest in the Hills: The Symbiosis of Women and Birds in Contemporary Australian Art I have taken my ‘painted collages’ to the next level. I have created imagined unwieldy sculptures of tea sets and local birds, painted Precious Precarious Porcelain pieces. These are my visual interpretation of the state of the world, from the environment, climate change, the resurgence of the right and the loss of empathy, the emergence of Ai and the lack of respect (and funding) for the arts, world events, even down to my health after my recent autoimmune diagnosis, all of which have left a feeling of insecurity, instability and quite unbalanced, exactly as if a whole lot of delicate porcelain was stacked precariously on top of each other without the proper foundations to hold it up and the slightest rustle of bird feathers would send it all crashing down into a broken yet sharp chaos.
Tea has long been associated with emotions, from ‘storm in a teacup’ to ‘tea and sympathy’, even ‘high tea’ as a form of celebration, and patterned teasets are historically associated with women, often depicting birds in their designs. In each of these four Precious Precarious Porcelain paintings I have taken a different local small bird and made them the feature amongst my chaotic tea sets.
