For the birds...

Sunday was a non-event, apart from the fact that my boiler bit the dust. No hot water, no heating - it reminded me of a friends boiler having expired, as she announced of another Sunday afternoon in the pub, and all the lads fell about laughing at the old boilers' boiler having packed up. It's one of those moments when, as a friend, you keep a straight face and excuse yourself to go to the bathroom to rid yourself of the bitten-down-on torrential laughter that is a cider-fulled haze... So, this Sunday is a lazy day - roll out of bed, with the specific aim of not achieving anything (which is a bit different to not doing anything) so, bolt the front door, turn off the phone, logoff all the incessant chatter that is facebook, forums, emails, IM and skype... and onto iPlayer: me and my iMac are one.

What a gem - well worth the browse: www.bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork/Turning - a stunning film; the use of birds as a metaphor: three older women visit a child and celebrate his birthday... the cinematography is gorgeous, the quality of surface of skin, clothes, feathers.. the characterization of these three women through the movement and inflection of birds... hypnotizing. African drumming evokes Alexander McCall Smiths writing and Karni & Sauls work has the same rapturous honesty and mystery. For more on these magicians: www.sulkybunny.com.

Well over a year ago, I started making books from old love letters. In the process of moving away from home, I had asked my mother for advice as to what I should do with them: piles of letters, envelopes, cards, bits of ribbons, pressed flowers, tucked away, bundled up. She said that she was sorry that she had thrown out letters some years previously, and maybe I should just hang onto them. I've been making books for a few years now, and it seemed to me that making books from my old love letters would bind them shut for ever, and immortalise the contents into a romantic memory. So, I set about with a rivet gun, a drill, and started work. 18 months later, I'm still making them. That's not to say I have a dumper truck of the things - we're talking pre-internet Ireland where technological and geographical constraints meant that putting pen to paper was sometimes a good option. Still, I value the written word today even more - the implications of committing to text is not to be underestimated. 

To display these love-letter books in a birdcage, or a parrot cage - an aviary, could lend the idea that these bookbirds were each a little life, with their own markings, feather constructions, spines. These books started to take on some of the attributes of birds; now I think very carefully about what kind of bird the book shall take the form of. I also like the irony: it's cruel to imprison any animal; endangered species need to be protected; stuffed birds were once a way of showing off the wealth of the hunting-fishing-gaming landed gentry. Actually, stuffed birds - animals generally, were presented in glass cases for educational value; Darwins' wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species was published in 1859, and in the light of this, many animals were stuffed in the name of exploring the minute permutations in the same breed, the birth of genetics as a scientific discipline, and with birds having a high reproduction rate and snappy life cycle, what better animal? Taxidermy is still alive and kicking in the Fine Art market today: www.dontpaniconline.com/polly-morgan whose work is as prepossessingly evocative as nature intended. The robin, above, was owned by Courtney Love. Morgan gives a visual and emotional language as strikingly beautiful as Rebecca Horns' kinetic sculptures: Der Zwilling des Raben (The Twin of the Crow), 1997, blogged about by vvoi , a blogger based in Warsaw: new-art.blogspot.com - check him out.

Teniers, The Archduke Leopolds Gallery, 1651

I live in a very male-dominated world, by choice, and my birdiness is something that I'm reminded of regularly; another story. So are all the relationships behind the love letters, but here's an exceptional one: hell hath no fury as a woman scorned. Jonathan Jones gave a lite review of Sophie Calle at the Whitechapel, 2009. Calle had received a Dear John via email (yes, insult to injury), and took action in a way only a woman can: she sent it to all her friends. Friends? These women from whom she illicited? invited? responses - anthropologists, linguist, dancers, feminists, psychoanalysts - learned women eminent in their fields, and she asked them to examine the email. The ensuing responses were framed, glass-cased, filmed; immaculately presented on plinths, wall-mounted; and these reached far up the walls, which must be 20 ft high in the Whitechapel Gallery, giving a similar visual impression that Teniers creates; in Teniers', there are recognisable paintings from Rubens, Titian, Raphael, amongst others; like the Archduke, Calle lines her walls with her big guns. Each response to Calle's email - whether it's transposed into music, painting, dance, a report: each viewpoint slowly flays this man, his written word dissected, probed, analysed. That man had nowhere to hide as his person, through this email, was dismantled and left as the only ghost in the room. Hell hath no further joy than the cold fury, the exquisite pain, the emotional removal of a thousand splinters. I was gobsmacked. 

Twitter to that!!!