Kelly Heaton
My practice deals with technology and nature. When COVID-19 sent humanity into quarantine, I was making sculptures and printed circuit tableaux involving electronic songbirds. For this series, I put birds in cages to express our collective isolation, restricted mobility, and diminished opportunity. We are living as caged birds, like canaries in the coalmine. I found suitable photographs from canary enthusiasts who breed for aesthetic perfection, and I was especially taken with a bent mutation variety that I used to depict possessiveness, bloodlines, and trauma, as seen in my image "YOUR.” The circuit diagrams that confine each bird are designs for functioning electronics, inspired by a decades-old schematic known as the canary doorbell. When electrified, these circuits produce strangely life-like sounds. In the following video, you can listen to some of my songbird circuits that double as cages in this coronavirus series.
Kelly Heaton, April 2020
Canaries in the Coalmine, 2020, a series of six works that form the following sentence: “ENOUGH LOVE WILL OVERCOME YOUR FEAR”
Kelly Heaton
All images courtesy of the artist. Thank you to Huw Evans for his assistance with photographs of canaries.