BIRDS

Single-channel artist film, stereo sound
Duration: 28:27

Watch the trailer

Press kit

BIRDS screened at Flickering Shores, Sea Imaginaries, Sea Art Festival 2023 edition, October-November 2023, Busan, South Korea.
Irini Papadimitrou, Artistic Director.

BIRDS premiered at the FLUX:ART+FILM strand at the 68th Sydney Film Festival, November 2021. "FLUX:ART+FILM explores the fertile ground between art and cinema, with radical and innovative films by artists who transform our experience of what cinema can be." — Bridget Ikin, Guest Programmer.

BRIEF SYNOPSIS

BIRDS is a tale of radioactive pigeons, two pairs of twins and a massacre, set in a seaside village in the shadow of a decrepit nuclear plant. In this blighted environment all is entangled — birds, humans, plutonium — and nothing will be spared.

ABOUT BIRDS

BIRDS is an artist film by Merilyn Fairskye, the latest in a series of photographic and screen works that explore the contemporary realities of nuclear sites and their legacies. With an aesthetic approach that emphasises the act of creation and construction over a passive recording and reconstruction of the world, BIRDS humanises the connections between the nuclear and the everyday at a time of great environmental threat and nuclear uncertainty.

BIRDS is inspired by real events that took place between 1998-2010 in the area around Sellafield, the large nuclear reprocessing site in Cumbria, UK. Martin Forwood, a long-time anti-nuclear campaigner (1947-2019), was Merilyn Fairskye’s guide when she visited Sellafield and Seascale, the neighbouring village, in 2016. On the way out of the village, they stopped in front of a pink house overlooking the sea. Martin related a story about the former occupants involving radioactive pigeons, two sets of twins, and a massacre. After several false starts, BIRDS is the result.

The real-life events behind this work, if related factually, could appear merely sensational and bizarre, and the larger resonances would be lost. BIRDS enters imaginary territory to shape a more nuanced context for these events in order to draw out what Kristine Stiles has called ‘the ever-present haunting of the nuclear age’.

Actors present different accounts as they were recorded in the media at the time. The imagery builds around the pink house, seaside and nuclear plant and accumulates and dissipates in different ways to create a sense of a volatile environment where all forms of life are entangled. The over-arching motif is the environment that the nuclear plant seeps into — land, sea and air — metamorphosing and mutating because of human actions and now, beyond human control. The birds are the constant presence, and unstoppable.

Ava and Birdie (Monette Lee), BIRDS 2020

Deryn and Robin (Dane Carson), BIRDS 2020

NOTES ON THE SOUNDTRACK

The actors’ voices are woven through a soundtrack that draws on experimental processes to give a voice to the birds and the environment. It was created by musician and composer Meg Travers, who constructed a 21st century interpretation of the Trautonium, a 1920s German synthesizer.

The original Trautonium, the first instrument capable of sculpting electronic sounds, was used by German composer and electronic music pioneer, Oskar Sala, to create the non-musical soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’.

To find out more see: UNLIKELY

The Official (Mayu Iwasaki), BIRDS 2020

CREDITS

executive producer
direction, editing, camera
soundscape composition and performance
dramaturg/assistant director
sound mix
online editor, title design and grading
production assistance

OGNIAN PISHEV
MERILYN FAIRSKYE
MEG TRAVERS
GREG GIESEKAM
ROBERT HINDLEY
GREG FERRIS
TONY TWIGG

CAST

ava/birdie
robin/deryn
official
announcer

additional voices

MONETTE LEE
DANE CARSON
MAYU IWASAKI
MICHIEL DOLK

SONJA BENNETTO
GREG GIESEKAM
DYLAN MCKIMMIE
LUCY MCKIMMIE
MEG TRAVERS
TONY TWIGG

CAST

additional UK photography

NICK SHIMMIN, CLIVE PARKINSON

Dedicated to Martin Forwood & Janine Allis-Smith

© 2020 A PLUS & MINUS PRODUCTION | www.plusandminus.net

Sydney Airport at Work Program. Commissioned by Sydney Airport Corporation Ltd. Installed October 2006.

Six polished stainless steel column structures of varying heights are dispersed in a diagonal line from near Wentworth Street to the beginning of Rialto Lane where it meets the Square. Each structure houses acoustic sound activated during the day. Fibre optic lighting is activated at night. Each column's lighting is a movement between four monochromatic tones. The effect is of liquid, subtly changing colour. From one end of the square to the other, the colour spectrum is played out. The structures are supported off the ground by a central steel rod. Additional coloured light washes down from inside onto a white granite surround. The structures appear to float on light. The height of the columns coincides with high tide levels on six dates, from 4000BC to May 28, 2000. The sound component is no longer functional, but when it was, once each day, at the time of the lowest tide for that date, the repeated chiming of a single note could be heard in each column. At noon the sounds combined to play an interpretation of a transcription by a European circa 1825 of an Aboriginal song from the Sydney region.

Art at Work Program, Sydney International Terminal, Mascot. Completed Aug. 2000

Today, when only objects valued by museums and collectors are enshrined in the history of art, we may recollect and reflect on a historical moment of activism by artists committed to a different social future for art. It was a time of collaboration between artists, but also of collaboration with social constituencies beyond the prevailing institutions and middle class enclaves of art. The Woolloomooloo Mural Project represents such a moment of engagement by artists concerned to find different social relations for artistic practice in Sydney. It also commemorates a history of those who fought for a different, a more socially inclusive and environmentally aware future for Sydney.

It is difficult in retrospect to overstate the significance of the battle for Victoria Street and the battle for Woolloomooloo; one was lost, the other won; both had an impact on the future of the inner city suburbs. Woolloomooloo was a working class community shaped by shared memories of the Depression and War years - a community in decline and revitalised by the struggle to save the area from private redevelopment. The residents' campaign succeeded with the intervention of trade union green-bans, the Whitlam Government and the NSW Housing Commission. When we first approached the Residents Action Group in 1979 through local advocate and architect Col James with a proposal to create a public artwork on the pylons of the Eastern Suburbs Railway, it was made clear to us that the residents wished to see their own history represented. Our own artistic concerns and interests were to be subsumed by this. The result, on eight of the 17 pylons, was a montage form of social portraiture in which the documentary record of street life culled from personal photo-albums and State Archives intersected with the media record of social protest and community activism. We commissioned artists Robert Eadie, Ruth Waller, Tim Maguire, Vicki Varvaressos, Angela Gee, Bob Clutterbuck, Toby Zoates, and Robyn Heks to create billboard paintings that addressed a range of themes on seven of the remaining pylons. We always envisaged that the history murals would have a limited life. We gave them ten years at most because of their location in a public park and thoroughfare, exposed to the weather. In response to community concerns however, the Sydney City Council recently intervened to preserve the murals as an enduring historical record that has become identified with the area.

As a unique record of time and place, film and photography have a documentary immediacy unavailable to any attempts to revive popular history painting as a public art. The footage of the opening of the Woolloomooloo Mural Project on July 10, 1982, originally recorded by Beth McRae, Erika Addis and Pat Fiske, has been re-mixed by Merilyn Fairskye - slowed down in order to inscribe a time and space for memory and reflection. Still photographs taken at the opening by Sandy Edwards have also been incorporated. Former BLF organiser and green bans activist Joe Owens was one of the speakers at the opening. His speech provides the soundtrack. Like the murals, the gathering reveals itself as a commemorative event and celebration owned and shared by the community and its supporters.

Michiel Dolk and Merilyn Fairskye
(Catalogue text for the exhibition Time and Space, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, July-August 2010)

A site-specific triptych incorporating aerial imagery, glass, reflected light and colour, and the red granite of Castle Hill

the concept:

Cutheringa evokes several journeys - through Aboriginal history and mythology to the present associated with Cutheringa, the original name given to Castle Hill in the centre of town, the red granite almost-mountain. This history and mythology around the name Cutheringa haven't been recorded, but the name apparently survives as one of only two known indigenous place names in the Townsville region.

In the context of the Emergency Department site, the artwork is evocative rather than descriptive or narrative. There is no set story here, rather a field of possibilities. The visible traces of the glare of the sun hitting the camera lens, and the fragment of wing in the exterior panel, reveal that this is no cosmic heavenly apparition, but rather, the familiar view from the inside of a plane, looking down through the clouds, this time to Townsville, visible as glimpsed fragments, and earthed through the solid materiality of the red granite of Castle Hill that sits amongst the image.

fabrication/construction

The artwork is in three parts.
Exterior and interior photographic sections using high resolution, Vivid Image Exterior, red granite section.
All with specialist lighting.

Aqua 2009, 123 Albert Street, Brisbane. Artist: Merilyn Fairskye

the concept:

Aqua - a site-specific public artwork incorporating time-lapse imagery, glass, reflected light and colour, and the movement of people. From a distance you see an abstract field of aqua, then, closer, an image forms an aerial view of a swimming pool, the horizontal field anchored by the black lane markings, and, even closer, a man floats in time and space across the surface of the water. The image provides an unexpected conceptual interruption to the busy streetscape. An iconic Queensland image, at the same time abstract, painterly and figurative. Appearing out of the blue like a mirage, it offers an oasis of cool in the heat of Brisbane.

The large tree near the wall on Albert Street becomes part of the work, a living screen that reveals and conceals, depending on where you happen to be. As you get close the image dissolves into a grid of pixels. A glass mural, one tile per pixel, covers the entire wall. The overall effect will be to glow and reflect intense colour in the shade that falls on the wall, and to sparkle in the sun. An intense vibrancy creates an effect that recalls the gestural and painterly qualities of Impressionism.

A transformative exchange takes place between the image, the adjacent walls, the surrounding streetscape, the movement of vehicles, weather conditions, the position of the sun, people in overlooking buildings, people passing through/using Albert Street. A sense of duration is embedded into the photographic moment of the swimmer in the pool.

fabrication/construction

The image, reworked for this context and codified into pixels 20mmx20mm each, transforms one of the images from the Aqua series of 2007. Each pixel of the image translates onto the wall as a single, monochromatic glass tile. The tiles are 20mmx20mm, installed directly onto the wall.

Wallsend in Sight 2005 Brickworks Park, Wallsend.
Commissioner: Newcastle City Council.
Artists: Michiel Dolk and Merilyn Fairskye

the concept:

The proposed art-work featuring 'brickwork', consists of 3 interrelated elements:

1. A brick sphere or monumental eyeball with 'red-belly' iris and aperture (pupil) oriented to the setting sun above the western entrance to the park. Aperture on the opposite pole of the sphere will form a spotlight at designated time of day/year.
2. A brick wall(s) on the north/south axis frames the sphere and forms an entrance to the quarry enclosure of indigenous bush-parkland. The height of wall is determined by adjacent mound/ground levels on either side of the central avenue. This establishes a strong horizon line below the elevation of the quarry wall.
3. Soundwork, (telephonic access to audio recording) for heritage interpretation and website for educational purposes

The proposed design brings clarity to a complex design brief and embodies the history of the site with a sculptural and architectural celebration of bricks in a bold signature motif. The use of brick is consistent with the Design brief. Few bricks with clay sourced and manufactured on site are available to the project. It is proposed to source commons pressed and coal fired in the same manner, from a brick manufacturer such as Namoi Valley Bricks. For both sphere and wall, bricks will be selected to resemble the original red-belly, and the sandstone and coal seam strata of the quarry wall, in particular the relationship between three colours - red ochre, pale yellow ochre, and grey.

The principal site identified for artwork, on the main axis, the avenue between the school playground and the lake observation platform is framed by trees. The plan therefore appears to require a work, sign, object or monument towards which the gaze is directed along the axis.

The brief suggests the use of bricks, which are not available on site. There are few extant bricks on site other than those in residual structures submerged in the quarry lake. At the risk of bringing coals to Newcastle, it may be necessary to bring bricks to Wallsend.

With audio track, 4 track audio remix, loop duration 05:00.
Adapted from an original sound composition by Robert Hindley.
Exhibited Toxicity, Sydney College of the Arts Galleries, 2011

In this collaborative project (4 artists, one writer), toxicity has been encouraged to take a handful of its potentially infinite number of forms. The surest thing about toxicity might well be this: it can never be eradicated from any world we live in, we have to live with it.

Around 1990 I was working a lot with the image of the face, depicted in a away that tried to evoke what I thought of as a 'space in between' (sleeping and waking, breathing and not-breathing, the conscious and the unconscious). I made a series of large diptychs, paintings from the series smoke of various people smoking. The phenomenon of breathing interested me, as did the non-scientific idea of the idea of smoke being unverifiable, loose in the air, unable to be seized, like a shadow. These paintings hovered somewhere between photography and painting.

My very early interest in anamorphosis remains, here translated into a possibility that is hinted at through the spaces that exist between the material planes or surfaces of the work.

from the site-specific series Proposals for Rooms with Columns

Smoke

This series of works was exhibited in New York, Sydney, Brisbane and Townsville between 1991 and 1993.

Exhibited at Roslyn Oxley Gallery9, Sydney, 1989 and Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1989, and individual paintings were later exhibited at Art Gallery of NSW, Art Gallery of Western Australia and Artis Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand. They were acquired by Art Gallery of NSW (Alchemy), Art Gallery of Western Australia (Iran Air), and Queensland Art Gallery (Leibschaft).