Endangered black throated finch

Deeply concerned like many of us about climate change and the effects on the Earth of our unsustainable ways of living, I have been searching for ways to make my practice more sustainable but also ways to express thee feelings. This year I have been creating endangered bird sculptures some of which I exhibited in a recent solo exhibition. They are created from painted recycled archival card and driftwood embedded with excerpts of music manuscripts symbolizing their song. The card is painted on both sides and its 2-dimensional thinness symbolizes to me the fading away of these beautiful birds. Totems of devastation and hopefully calls to action to preserve earth our precious home.

This is my most recent, created for this exhibition. Over decades of habitat destruction, this small black throated finch has been forced to retreat to a few small pockets of grassland in central and north Queensland and is now threatened by extinction due to Adani’s Carmichael coal mine. To me, the finch is a symbol of the scale of devastation the mine will have on plants animals underground springs, and sacred Aboriginal land.
The finch in this sculpture sits vulnerably on a simulated piece of coal -perhaps asking us what do we prefer?