TWITCHERS is curated by Juliet Fowler Smith and
Noelene Lucas.
Opening Friday 15 July 6-8pm
TWITCHERS brings together artists
who are delighted, amazed, curious and worried about our feathered friends.
They are: Linden Braye, Juliet Fowler Smith, Anne Graham,
Noelene Lucas and Debra Porch. Most bird watchers prefer to be called
‘birders’ these days, but we still like the word ‘twitchers’ as we
definitely feel twitchy about the subject.
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| Juliet Fowler Smith Curlew pencil on wall 2015 |
Birds...don't you just love them? Their grace, power, beauty, their songs and behaviour and, for some of us, their flavour!
Our feathered friends can be seen as
‘the canaries in the coal mine’ with their numbers and habitats dwindling as we
hog or wreck life’s essentials: forests, clean air, water and wetlands (over
50% of wetlands in Australia have already been wrecked!).
While birds serve as metaphors for the
soul, freedom, peace and war as well as symbols of national identity – raptors, for example, can stand for war, aggression and
dominance – we also hunt birds for food, trophies
and fashion. And we share their predicament as we irrevocably change the
planet.
Anthropogenic climate change has caused populations of
migratory birds to decline. It is tough for these birds, genetically programmed to
think ‘I'm on my way to food and shelter’, to arrive exhausted and depleted at
a wasteland, a garbage dump or dried up wetlands. Some
birds get called vagrants when they change location and come to the city (the Ibis
in Sydney), but they are often desperately responding to displacement, wild
populations attempting to survive by adapting to conditions we humans have
created. Scientists call this a
‘phenological
mismatch’, when food availability no longer matches the birds’ timing for food
and reproduction, a mismatch of our making, as we wreck bird habitats and
sometimes even regard them as pests.
Some birds are just mind-bogglingly
amazing: navigating vast distances, in tune with the climate, winds,
currents, searching for tasty titbits and a place to rest and nest. Some demonstrate
extraordinary behaviour, others make us laugh, touching our hearts and minds.
Their songs lift our spirits and inspire us. Incredibly, more than half the
world’s birds and all the songbirds
have their origins in Australia. Don't we have some responsibility for their
condition, their survival?