Bird Song Broadsides with Artist's Books at CFAM

This installation of "Bird Song Broadsides" was from the Faculty Exhibition at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum in Winter Park, FL in 2018.

This series of letterpress broadsides contemplates bird song mnemonics, the phrases created to help birders remember & identify bird song. These little catch phrases reveal much about the cultural values & perspectives of the birdwatchers who wrote them. While authors of historical field guides assumed their audience to be fairly homogenous—mainly white, male & Christian—authors of contemporary bird guides use more universally understood phonetic mnemonics. Traditional phrases like “Pres, Pres, Presbyterian” seem oddly specific to contemporary viewers, and evoke questions: Why that phrase? What does this birdsong sound like to me? What phrase would I create? These ideas reflect our evolving attitudes towards nature as an extension of our current social systems. I printed these broadsides on a Vandercook IV using Penland’s collection during last year’s Winter Residency. Exploring a different type collection made the expressive potential of typography even more exciting. The public, exclamatory nature of the broadside format and the large scale Gothic and Clarendon type enhance the sounds of the text. I considered the color & translucency of the ink in relation to these fonts and the textures of the paper to create an overall concept for each sound-based text-image. The blocky, repeating pattern of the P22 Blox underneath the text suggest our current moment in human evolution—as we move towards living in high-density urban environments where birds have adapted to our development of the landscape.

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The Good Bird Watcher Is Also a Bird Listener