Artistic Evolution: My Bird Obsession

05 May, 2025

The Wild Swans, Nadezhda Illarionova

Artistic Evolution: Beginnings

My favorite story of human-bird hybridism is The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Anderson.  In this story, the evil stepmother turns her eleven stepsons into swans who become human at night, but are forced to fly by day. Their sister, banished by the queen, finds them, and is told by a fairy that she can break the spell by knitting shirts from stinging nettles for the princes. She must do this, however, without speaking a word, or all of them will die.

Accused of witchcraft for gathering nettles in a graveyard, she is sentenced to death by burning. Nonetheless, she continues to knit almost until the pyre is lit. The swans suddenly appear from the sky, and she hurries to throw the shirts over their heads. She was unable to finish the left arm of her youngest bother's shirt, so he forever has one wing instead of an arm.

I think this must be where my obsession with one-winged humans came from, as I loved this story from the time I was a child. I also wrote about humans with one wing in a previous post.

Troubled Skies, monoprint with mixed media, 18 x 25 in

Fairy Tales and Stories

The large collage at left, The Spell is Broken, is very much focused on narrative. While the 'story' will vary from viewer to viewer, it obviously references fairy-tale-ish content and imagery. I purposely left it ambiguous as to whether the woman was turning into a bird, or, having been a bird, was transforming into a human.

I even started writing my own folk tale-ish story about Heron and Crow inventing the universe. I shared more about that in this post. Crow Creates the Night, right, is one of the illustrations for that story.

My Bird Obsession

In my own work, transformation and rebirth/regeneration are frequent themes, often expressed through bird symbolism. Not an Open Book (below) is a book-like structure I made which expresses my hidden fears and my hopes for growth and transformation. It contains several symbolic bird images, from the bird skeleton to a tethered bird who longs to fly free.

Allies

Even as far back as the 1990's, I frequently depicted birds and humans as allies. In The Speed of Darkness, right, the magical glowing crow appears to be helping the little girl in her search for the blue crystals. Will the crystals provide her with light as the sun sinks behind the hills? Are the other crows coming to lend their help and protection as well?

When You Speak to the Birds (Give Them My Love)

This bird/human mash-up, above, is one of my favorite collages. The outline of a girl with a hummingbird heart, wing, and tulip head, is speaking in birdsong, in concert with the birds flying above in the speech bubble. The 'tree-man' seems to be in conversation with two birds, one of which sits on his shoulder. This ties in with my themes of interconnection and biophilia - we are not separate from nature, but are all intricately connected.

Obsession Meets Ecology

My bird obsession became more important to me over time, as I began to focus on interconnection in an increasingly ecological context. And as I learned more about the decline in bird populations, I felt I should try to call attention to this issue with my work. How to do that, exactly, is an exploration that's still evolving.

Reliquary, above, links my reverence for nature with the devastating loss of these special creatures. The Oxford dictionary defines 'relic' as "a part of a deceased holy person's body or belongings kept as an object of reverence." A reliquary is a place or container where these objects are kept.

This digital piece, Song of the Sky by Garis Edelweiss (left) needs no words. The end of peace, is how I would interpret it. When I first saw it, I was just so deeply affected by the emotional impact of the crashing bird. Such a powerful image.

The photograph below by Todd R. Forsgren is alarming at first sight, because the bird appears to be in extreme distress. Actually, these birds have been caught by scientists to be tagged for ecological research, then released.

Forsgren has many onging eco-art projects; I encourage you to check them out on his website. He states:

"These photographs depict birds that have been temporarily caught in mist nets during ornithological research. It is a unique moment, just before a researcher removes the bird from the net to be weighed and measured....The bird is then released and flies away.... I have sought out this moment as a space to consider our values and balance our empathy with our capability to think abstractly."

You may have already seen my monoprint with mixed media piece Sacrifice, above. However, I feel the statement I wrote to accompany the piece in its first exhibition bears repeating:

"As humans continue to disregard the interconnectedness of all things and the importance of biodiversity to the survival of any ecosystem, we are quickly losing untold numbers of animal and plant species. The population of North American birds has dropped nearly 30% since 1970 – a loss of almost three billion birds. We sacrifice these creatures on the altar of our ignorance and greed, driven by a culture of wasteful consumerism. The rubies coming from the blood of the bird symbolize its sacred and precious nature, and also a sense of hope that ultimately a new awakening may come from these sacrifices."

The chart above shows the change in population of different types of birds since 1970. Birds are the proverbial 'canary in the coal mine'; they are perhaps more vulnerable to climatic changes than some other forms of life, and their absence more noticible. I don't know who created the graphic; if you do, then please let me know so I can credit them.

There will be more birds in my work, as well as bird/humans and human/birds, and other creatures as well. To finish out the post, and the series, I'm sharing a new piece that features a bird/human alliance as well as a bird/human hybrid, below.

Waiting for the Storm, monoprint with mixed media, 18 x 25 in

Wishing you all peace, love, and art, my friends!