Yet to live in a place without house sparrows
acrylic on board
overall installation size: 15m x 15m, 2016
My work employs various materials and methodologies to think through the anthropocene as a decolonial project and towards new pictorial and discursive possibilities of landscape. An unconventional practice of birdwatching, shifted my gaze to reconsider the human’s relationship to introduced species. Due to its current range and my own Argentinian and Australian histories, the house sparrow (passer domesticus L.) has always been part of my ‘southern’ landscape. Yet to live in a place without house sparrows unpacks the potentiality of language and the materiality of painting to call upon the histories of coloniality that linger in most of the world. The work employs a font developed in the studio, applied via a series of parameters to generate multiple iterations of this phrase. There are few locations left without house sparrows. We might slow down enough to read a landscape and notice the colonial histories of the spaces we inhabit.
