I regularly publish visual art-focused critiques that contribute to current thought by examining and reflecting on the changing relationships between humans and nature. My key project, Birds & Language, is an extension of this research and has involved making abstract bird sculptures and working in cross-disciplinary and inclusive ways.

Through Birds & Language, I bring together artists, thinkers and conservationists, providing an opportunity to build grounds for a cross-disciplinary encounter between the natural sciences, the humanities, and the creative arts. I lead research in unique fusions of linguistics, ornithology, evolutionary theory, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, music, and so on, extending and challenging existing hierarchies and moving the parameters of visual art practice into exciting new transdisciplinary ways of working.

These bird projects have included:

• A two-day Birds and Language Conference hosted by USyd SACE (co-convened with Ian Maxwell) with international and national attendees and presenters. The two days concluded with an online pop-up exhibition (due to COVID-19 restrictions). The conference and exhibition were an enormous success, with significant external reach: 346+ registrations and 70 in attendance (two days). From Darwin to Tasmania, 20 writers and 20 artists contributed to this national event.
• A major exhibition, Birds and Language, at one of NSW’s largest regional art museums, Wollongong Art Gallery, supplemented by special events and accompanied by a 15-page colour catalogue (print), which included my 2800-word critical curatorial essay about 21 artists, previewed in Artist Profile Magazine.
• Following this, Jen Valender and I edited a ‘Birds and Language’ edition of Unlikely – Journal for Creative Arts. Unlikely is run by The University of Melbourne and is a prestigious transdisciplinary journal, which aims to open unexpected spaces for artistic exchange and scholarly conversations across mediums, disciplines and continents (Issue 08). We published 17 double-blind peer-reviewed scholarly essays and 14 media-rich creative research projects in the Project Space.

My bird artworks are an ongoing diary of sorts, and belong to significant public collections: Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; the University of Queensland Art Museum; the University of Wollongong Art Collection and the Queensland Children’s Hospital. In these sculptures painted with encaustic wax, abstract images of birds primarily spotted in Australia are squeezed or trapped into the rectilinear architecture of empty Tetra Paks. The resulting expressionist distortions – angular in shape as determined by the cartons – are half bird and half cultural object, suggesting the continual commodification of nature, a world gradually destroying itself, and the transformation of rubbish. In capitulating to the cartons’ open spouts, the birds embody the phantasmatic property of everyday materials replete with associative meanings of myth and consumerism. Two modes of identity – birds/cartons and art / consumer material – are sustained simultaneously in a single object.

From an art-historical perspective, the planes of colour recall the work of Color Field painter Ellsworth Kelly who attributes his minimal colour abstractions and the titles of his works to birdwatching as a young boy with his grandmother. Yet, in contrast to the restraint of formalist colour field painting, these birds might be said to return abstraction to its counterpart in nature, producing effects whereby the different permutations of colour and combinations of form embrace diversity, visual analogy and the aesthetic quality of these remarkable animals. The category depends on the intersection of birds that are seen and are therefore made, but their squashed states also suggest a crisis – those endangered, betrayed or disappeared.