YOTB Install at MRAG

It felt like painting two giant lounge rooms more than anything (up until today), but work for Year of the Bird has finally made it to the walls at Maitland Regional Art Gallery.

So much paint and preparation, just to get back to the gallery's usual white cube, but it is now looking like more of an exhibition.

Lisa Kirkpatrick, Braddon Snape, the installation team and MRAG volunteers have been fantastic in materialising the show so far. Clare Hodgins has designed a fantastic catalogue to accompany the exhibition. Enormous thanks to them!

Please join us for the opening on Saturday 23rd February at 3:00pm if you can...

David Hampton's work in progress at the YOTB install @ MRAG 19/02/2013

Invitation to the opening celebration

Everyone is welcome to the opening celebration for the Year of the Bird exhibition.

Dr Rod Bennison, the Minding Animals International CEO, will be saying a few words at the opening.

Several other shows are also opening at the same time so it should be a good afternoon. for further details see the MRAG site.

www.mrag.org.au

Please click on the invitation for a larger sized option

YOTB Work in Progress... Caelli Jo Brooker

Some preliminary sketches for Caelli Jo Brooker's work for Year of the Bird.

"...Our relationship with the bird is complex. We have a long cultural history of using birds decoratively, symbolically, narratively, allegorically and consuming them literally and metaphorically through advertising, art, commerce and fashion.

My work for Year of the Bird borrows from mythological, literary and popular culture representations of birds and re-imagines them in abstracted imaginary ‘field studies’. These large scale painted drawings are also personal interpretations of the museological and presentational aspects of natural history traditions, incorporating abstract note-taking, anatomy and typography. References to these borrowed traditions are woven with more contemporary mythos, reflecting the bird’s ongoing place in our collective cultural psyche..."

Sketches for Abstract Mythological Field Studies 2012
watercolour and crayon on paper
42 x 29.7 cm (each)

Year of the Bird at MRAG 2013

Year of the Bird
22 February - 7 April 2013
Maitland Regional Art Gallery, NSW Australia

‘Year of the Bird’ (YOTB), is a group exhibition exploring the prevalence of bird imagery in contemporary art and features the work of Marian Drew, Kate Foster (UK), Emma Van Leest, Pamela See, Vanessa Barbay, Trevor Weekes, Helen Wright, David Hampton and the curators, Helen Hopcroft and Caelli Jo Brooker.

Thematically the exhibition explores themes of nature versus culture, wildlife as elegy, representations of non-human animals, and birds as potent signifiers of both human and environmental issues.