5/ Specimens

With a desire to incorporate native bird species into my work, I envisioned the rebus as a structural device—a way to link my previous work’s text with figurative imagery from my surroundings. The rebus is a puzzle-like string of ideograms and letters creating a phrase. These paintings seek an equivalence between letterforms, birds, and pure gesture. Our alphabet has evolved from hieroglyphic to phonetic and abstract; this series plays with the rhyming of letterforms with avian shape. The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the eco-phenomenology of David Abram have helped me better articulate what I had been probing instinctively in my painting: there is a hidden story behind each letter!