I thought it only concerned me and the birds.
An ode to Tennessee Williams.
This work was originally conceived as a commission for Rhod 2012. Rhod is an annual site-specific exhibition on the site of a Grade II listed water mill, called Melin Glonc in Drefelin, Carmarthenshire. The place has a somewhat extraordinary history, including an attempt to make it into a kind of zoo for exotic birds. The remnants of the failed aviary remain on the site. It was, in fact, somewhat fortunate that this project failed, because no sooner had the exotic birds been rehomed but a fire decimated the site.
During my site visits in the lead up to the show I sat in one of the old dilapidated bird cages and drew repetitively - the birds, the moss, the grass, the sky. I would spend the whole day in the cage just drawing.
During the residency period, I watched the film “The Birds” by Alfred Hitchcock for the first time. This combined with the almost Jane Eyre esque imagery of the fire ripping through the site and the imagined cacophony of noise had the birds still been caged on site, layered what should have been an idyllic scene with sinister undertones. I was also reading “Ode to the Nightingale” by Tennessee Williams which draws some profound comparisons between birds and a troubled mental state.
For the original commission I placed a chair on which I had carved a series of birds next to the cage and three faux heritage information signs with a selection of the site drawings and quotes from the Tennessee Williams text. The lack of tour guide and the empty chair were meant to be emblematic of vanishing histories.
Later, I reworked the piece for Kings Street Gallery. In this space I transformed the drawings into miniature bird boxes. This time the chair was occupied for parts of the performance whereby I read extracts of the play and then proceeded to sing snippets of traditional English folks songs about birds into each bird box, sealed the bird box and placed it in the space. A projection of the original site can be seen in the background. Drawings from the site were also exhibited in the space.
