Birds by Melissa Borman

Issue 164

In the winter of 2020, as I was preparing for a solo exhibition that spring (which eventually was canceled), I made a photograph of a little ceramic bird in my studio. I had picked up the figurine at a thrift store with the intention of breaking it to use the pieces in an installation. I thought preserving the figurine's elegant form in a photograph would make the act of destruction easier. I was wrong.

The enlarged image made a poorly re-glued flower petal more visible and the little bird even more endearing. I couldn’t bring myself to break it. Instead, I added more well-worn ceramic birds to my collection and spent the gray days of January photographing them.

Little did I know that the solitude of winter would last throughout 2020 and beyond. That May, my mother passed away the same week George Floyd was murdered just a few miles from my home. I inherited my mother’s collection of bird figurines and the project evolved. Selecting backdrops and arranging the figurines became a meditation on individual as well as collective grief.

Showing chipped beaks, a missing eye, or a broken tail, Birds is about the fragile things we love and treasure. We make space for them, we care for them, and yet more often than not someone will find them neglected or damaged despite our good intentions. The work asserts that they, like so many imperfect and once abandoned things, are worthy of care and attention.

Melissa Borman (she/her) lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
www.melissaborman.com | @melissa.borman

All images © Melissa Borman