myvanwy gibson - THE ANIMAL HUMMINGBIRD

Title: THE ANIMAL HUMMINGBIRD (2021)

I was researching a project incorporating birds and happened to receive a recommendation to read a paper called ‘the Animal Hummingbird’ from the proceedings of the Congress ‘taboo, transgression transcendence in art and science’. This paper, written by ecologist and bio-artist Felipe Shibuya, made reference to a painting done by Martin Johnson Heade titled ‘Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds’. This painting when see it reprinted in the article had a very uncanny resemblance to a painting I had recently bought by a contemporary Italian artist called Francesco Zanatta. The thing is in Zanatta’s work the birds are gone, the moss that dripped from the trees is dead, and the scene has a feeling of beautiful decay rather then the saccharine life of the original. So what? Well I bought the piece instinctively and immediately, and this wonderful coincidence led me to put some importance on the paper written by Shibuya and so to the concepts within it about the mysterious being that is the Hummingbird. Hence the title of these works - The Animal Hummingbird.

'...evolution allows the hummingbird to see a spectrum inaccessible to us, the ultraviolet. With this advantage, these birds can see a world invisible to humans.'