Sharon Beals is a photography who uses her images to create awareness of native habitats, specifically, nests. Beals felt compelled to photograph nests for their intricate form, excellent variety and also the spectacular colour of bird eggs. Unlike my Great Uncle Peter’s photography, Beals’ photographs provide an insight into the beautiful complexity that is nature’s architecture outside of their context. Birds masterfully and instinctually transform sticks and twigs, as well as, spider webs, caterpillar cocoons, plant down, mud, found objects, human and animal hair, mosses, lichen, and feathers into future homes for their young. While few nests are collected today, these specimens are used for research, providing important information about bird habitats, DNA, diseases, and other environmental factors. Through her photography, Beals’s passion is to inspire others to learn about birds and care about the conservation issues that affect us all. Beal’s work shares a clear connection with my own work through the importance of environmental issues and human waste. I find the work she creates using washed up plastic enticing as she manages to convey these objects rather beautifully, giving them a value they did not have to begin with. In the same I scavenge for materials, once I incorporate them in the that I do within my work, they no longer look like rubbish or waste, but they are given a new, more meaningful, aesthetic.
Research Links:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-art-of-the-birds-nest-3706390/?no-ist
The fragile beauty of birds’ nests: Sharon Beals at TED2012
ARTIST RESEARCH 