Bird Hide

BACKGROUND Contemporary Australia: Women celebrates the diversity, energy and innovation in work by established and emerging artists across all. Key exhibition themes addressed 'performing' femininity; women's particular life experiences; the use of everyday domestic materials; 'redressing the canon' of painting; and key current issues. Specifically Weaver was influenced by Édouard Manet's work Young Lady in 1866 (showing all the senses as well as the bird hide provides a metaphor for gazing on women from the male perspective (male as unseen) an atmospheric, perceptive unfolding narrative. CONTRIBUTION Bird Hide investigates the ways particular combinations of materials, patterns and sensory experiences enable psychological and physical removes from a location or time, it questions how a sculptural screen can reanimate space with fantasy, imagination, or even the paranormal. It is innovative in using of what may be considered 'ephemeral' sculptural materials (Japanese paper and thread), combined with sensory elements such as recorded bird song, to create a technically complex large-scale sculptural screen as a deliberate intervention to create an overlay of pattern to break the 'readability' of a solid form, thus allowing the viewer metaphoric discretion and cover. 'Weaver's work Bird Hide 2011 draws on the rich lode of feminist and other theories of representation and viewing, but wears them lightly- in Weaver's hands nature and culture are so superbly intertwined (and problematized) that one must look and listen closely.' Julie Ewington, GOMA. The work took about 18 months using small strips of plastic covered with Japanese paper. The pattern on the right was influenced by a disrupted spider-web, creating abstract art in nature. SIGNIFICANCE Commissioned by GOMA. Other artists included Kate Mitchell, Rose Nolan and Sandra Selig. Also exhibited in Animate/Inanimate, TarraWarra Museum of Art, 2013.