"Invisible Birds," 2018-2022

The last Carolina parakeet, the only North American parrot, died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1918, almost exactly 100 years ago. One night I dreamt that there were nocturnal birds with feathers of vantablack, the darkest substance known. They couldn’t be seen, so they couldn’t be destroyed; they were adapted to human exploitation by evolving into “Invisible Birds.” The fabric imagery for this project is based on the “Invisible Bird” tintype series, which made use exclusively of expired plates—up to ten years beyond usability. The setting is a cleared plot of land close by my home; this “stump garden” serves as the backdrop to handmade cloth backdrops depicting flocks of birds, one fabricated from small effigies and another photographed as an exploding murmuration. The plates have been translated into a new generation of gossamer backdrops and layered together with the originals depicted in the tintypes, in a potentially infinite cycle of creation and re-creation--a gesture of hope or a prayer in an ocean of inevitable conflict.