Liz Harrison : Perch
'Perch' is a video and sculptural installation, and concerns reflections on vanishing birds and ornithological observations.

Installation view: Five Years, London. January 2009

'Perch' (installation detail) DVD still 'Letter XL from Gilbert White to Thomas Pennant 1773' 60' loop.
Click here for Gilbert White letter.
'Perch' 2009 (installation general view) mixed media, 2 looped DVDs plus projection.
        Click to enlarge
'Perch' (installation detail) DVD still 'Mobile Phones & Vanishing Birds'. 25' loop. Click here for 'Mobile Phones' text
'Perch' (installation detail) DVD projection still 'Sparrows' 3' loop
A work made specifically as a response to the architectural space at Five Years, London; housed within an industrial unit and 'perched', the last cube along the 6th floor corridor, on the edge of the building; a purely functional building devoid of any sense of place or relationship with the natural environment. It invokes feelings of anonymity, void, exclusion. This space catalysed a visual response invoking observations on nature from past, romantic viewpoints and present day personal observations on the natural world, and its demise: a theatre imported. The void is re-presented by the simply staged artificiality of a natural habitat. The format and methodologies for this installation reveal conflicts of realities, the ordinary and the mundane/ the poetic, the imaginary and the idealistic.

Central to the installation is the chance filming of sparrows, once ubiquitous in our cities, which stimulated the ideas and form of this video installation. It reveals an illusion that evokes feelings of not only sentiment but also disquiet. The film is both familiar and comic and is staged as a fictional tableau, but invokes an inevitable sense of unease about our expanding technological environment. Our desire is for things always to remain the same, and to believe in the 'bird' or the 'sparrow' chirruping away and for it to be a given sentiment.

History is re-animated into the present, with a juxtaposition of ideas and notions. Writings from 'The Natural History of Selbourne'. first published 1788-9, by the 18th century naturalist Gilbert White and the mobile communication systems that have escalated from the 20th to 21st century have inspired and informed this work.

 

Click to enlarge

Details (clockwise) :
'Perch' (installation detai)l
'Perch' (installation detail) concrete, wood, copper
'Perch' (installation general view)
'Perch' (detail) DVD still

More images :
'Twittering Machine' by Louisa Minkin see : www.fiveyears.org.uk/archive2/pages/039/pages/039.html
and
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/377825