Discover Barwon Park through the creative response of local artists, whose installations and artworks interrogate the site for Trust Contemporary: Barwon Park Reimagined.

ARTIST: Mary-Jane Walker.

Now You See Us Bird project also includes Jen Tostevin and Rob Cuttler

This work also featured a soundscape by Vicki Hallett

MEDIUM: All birds and plants constructed from hand painted and cut recycled and other papers; steel and wire sub-structures

DIMENSIONS: Various

ARTIST STATEMENT:

This is work is about understanding our changing relationship with nature. On the 6th July 1864, Thomas Austin who built Barwon Park attended a grand dinner for the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria of which he was an enthusiastic member. It was held at Scott’s Hotel, Collins Street. Their aim was to introduce exotic species so that Australia could become more like Europe, our indigenous species being regarded as inferior. The ecological consequences of these actions were largely unforeseen. Curried bandicoot, wombat and brolga were on the menu. Everything was up for consumption

Today we live with the environmental legacy of their actions as well as the lingering attitude that nature is here simply for our exploitation. This age of man’s dominance of the natural world is now called the Anthropocene. If we are to have a future on this complex, changing planet it will depend on understanding and respecting its intricate interrelationships.

In this work the threatened birds of this region stage a reverse invasion of that dinner reimagined using the discarded papers of our consumer society, arguably a consequence of those early attitudes. Plants are depicted as alien species just as those introduced species were themselves alien.

BIRDS FEATURED
White-Bellied Sea Eagle
Azure Kingfisher
Eastern Curlew
Brolga
Shy Albatross
Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo
Barking Owl
Spotted Harrier
Bush Stone Curlew