Meet the Artist: Rachel Berwick
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Rachel Berwick's sculptural installations investigate ideas of vulnerability and loss in the animal world. Her past projects have explored the extinct Tasmanian Tiger; the Galápagos giant tortoise, Lonesome George; and Martha, the last passenger pigeon. Berwick employs materials such as amber, crystal, and glass to reference natural phenomena and create haunting reminders of what has been—or is nearly—lost.
“Zugunruhe” comes from the German term to describe the restlessness that migratory birds display prior to migration.
I was also very interested in the passenger pigeon because it's a species that's indigenous to North America but went extinct in the early 1900s. It was a bird that used to fly in flocks of millions, and it was famous for these migrations. To try to envision those migrations where birds would be approaching and passing over for three days at a time—it's really hard to imagine, actually.
I was combining this idea of zugunruhe with the passenger pigeon and decided to do this piece where I cast off of a passenger pigeon a taxidermy passenger pigeon specimen. I then made hundreds of these casts in amber of the passenger pigeon and then created this tree placed within what's essentially a mirrored box. You can look into it, but as you walk around it, what happens is that it's lit so that the birds and the tree multiply in reflection. You kind of gain and lose this perspective of this transformation of the tree from one single tree to maybe 200 birds, to several trees, or a forest under a migration.
At the same time, what I was thinking about with blue birds that interested me and the indigo bunting is one that's really this striking blue, a structural blue. It's a structural color, not a pigmented color. In, maybe layman's terms, what it is, is light scattering. Light scattering is what makes the sky blue. Then when I discovered that glass can also make light scattering to make blue, I just loved this idea that they share this ability to make structural blue.
The pieces themselves that you see in the show today are both large spheres about 20 inches in diameter, smooth on the outside, but on the inside what I've done is to cast off of songbird bodies to make sort of negative impressions of songbirds through all the way around. The way they read is almost like a topographic map.
In one it's a very kind of light blue, and I call that the day sky. The other one is a much darker blue, which is the night sky. In the day sky, of course, it's much easier to see these impressions and to see the highs and lows of the birds where they are closer and farther away from the surface of the sphere. In the darker one, what really happens in the places where the birds are deeper, is that you lose the birds into the dark. The dark is a dark blue that almost goes black, so there's kind of the finding and the losing of them.