Maitland Mercury Article YOTB

Emma Swain from the Maitland Mercury popped by as we were installing to interview Helen and myself about the exhibition. We were still curating, so we roped Lisa Kirkpatrick in for the photo as we pretended to decide on our favorite David Hamptons (which is of course, all of them!)

Please click on the image below for a more readable version.

Maitland Mercury article 21 February 2013

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.