In the midst of creating for a big project, the space where I sleep becomes increasingly chaotic. Maintenance deteriorates until the project is complete.

The curated version of life is tidy, the reality is messy.

Last night I brought all the birds into the bedroom so I could wake up next to them. This isn’t the temple of pure white walls and perfect gallery lighting, and yet I am happy to see them here. It was the first good night’s sleep I have had in weeks. Today they will migrate south to be hung in an exhibition. They may never return to this place.

This project has been centered in the space between the seen and the unseen. As a fiber artist, this series might be seen as a bit out of my ecosystem - a flirting with the realm of the wall. Mounting textiles to cradled panels, encasing them in encaustic resin, they become solidified into something different. Not unlike taxidermy. An irony perhaps, or a nod to all the artists who have agonized over the rendering of cloth’s liveliness in paint and stone.

Waxed cloth has traditions- useful especially at sea. Waxed cloth surely has tradition, though this is not one of them. This is cloth made static, the lovely folds flattened, made into a funerary portrait of cloth. Yet the wax makes the colors luminous, and even without folds there is depth. The wax renders a transformation of these ancient dyes married to cloth. Now married to wax and resin, they become something unexpectedly more.

The dye plants used are all ancient - they have traveled with humans for thousands of years - they have seen us at our best, and at our worst. The birds themselves have so many stories to convey, they who are so often heard and not seen. Who will know them in this form? I have tried to infuse their songs into the cloth - will this be felt?

For the moment, I have become a messenger for the messengers. Hoping that the right eyes will read what they need from the missives. The messages are in code. Encoded even from me - layers and layers of meaning - not all of it meant for my eyes. It is not for me to interpret what all of this will be for the recipients.

The story is told by the dance of the honeybees who brought pollen and nectar back to the hive - honey-to-wax-to-crystalline structure. The form of the Steller’s Jay feather refracting the light as they move through the forest - a blue flash illusion of sky. I have tried to convey that flash with indigo and iron. Substituting the solid and hard, for something that is not even there. All is not as it seems. The story is always broader, deeper, more nuanced than can be told by one such as me.

There is both darkness made from light, and the brightness to lead us from dark here. The white of the chickadee cheek like a lantern at the gate. Each bird a portal into more and more miraculous wonder if we can open our eyes from the dreams of the human world which enthrall us.

These birds are not The Birds, they are just letters from them.

Waking up to Birds