Born 1962 in Somers Point, NJ
Lives and works in Killingworth, CT
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.
Image Gallery
Rachel Berwick, Zugunruhe, 2009, cast copal, wood, two-way mirror, moss, metal, and polyester resin, 108 x 180 in. (diameter), Courtesy of the artist © Rachel Berwick. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by John Groo
Zugunruhe simulates the wonder of a passenger pigeon flock amidst a vast forest. Despite the illusion, the sculpture is composed of a lone tree supporting hundreds of cast pigeons. As one walks around the piece, the birds appear to multiply and vanish in the mirrored surface, suggesting their historic migrations and ultimate extinction. The term zugunruhe describes the nighttime restlessness that all birds exhibit before migration. But here their movement is arrested. The passenger pigeon is frozen in time like a specimen preserved in amber. In a poignant twist, Berwick’s motionless birds can only be reanimated by our own movement around the glass.
Rachel Berwick, Blueshift, 2014, cast crystal and metal, 52 x 21 x 21 in. each, Courtesy of the artist
Blueshift is inspired by Berwick’s ongoing research into the biology and behaviors of migratory birds, particularly the indigo bunting. Berwick learned that the vivid plumage of this small bird comes not from pigmentation but the structure of the feather itself, which refracts incoming light in much the same way that scattered light makes the sky look blue. Berwick replicates this phenomenon in crystal spheres, creating two different shades of blue that symbolize day and night. On the interior of each globe, cast impressions of songbirds give the illusion of a topographical map that suggests the birds’ ability to navigate both earth and sky. The delicate forms hover like continents, connecting the terrestrial and celestial as only birds can.
Videos
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Rachel Berwick speaks about her work in the exhibition The Singing and the Silence: Birds in Contemporary Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The exhibition examines mankind's relationship to birds and the natural world through the eyes of twelve major contemporary American artists, including David Beck, Rachel Berwick, Lorna Bieber, Barbara Bosworth, Joann Brennan, Petah Coyne, Walton Ford, Paula McCartney, James Prosek, Laurel Roth Hope, Fred Tomaselli, and Tom Uttech.
“Zugunruhe” is a term that I came across when I was a research fellow at the Smithsonian, I was an artist research fellow about six years ago, and I came down to the Smithsonian to research migration, bird migration specifically, because as an artist I work with themes of loss and extinction and our desire to recover, and I look to natural history, stories in natural history that lend themselves to those themes. When I was learning about my mission I came across this term “zugunruhe,” and it’s a term that was devised to describe the restlessness that migratory species felt prior to migration and I was just really interested in this idea that there’s this something innate within the species that needs to go, needs to migrate, needs to move. And so that term was what I titled this work.
The piece itself, I would say is structured to respond to or relate to the restlessness described in the term “zugunruhe” in a couple different levels. What I’ve done is to construct this seven-sided large display device, I would call it. It’s multi-sided covered tree with a two-way mirror and what happens with this architectural mirror is that as the viewer walks around it and as light plays off of it what happens is that the tree and the birds that are placed within it multiply in reflection and then also disappear. So, it is something that really makes the work active, it also makes the work interactive with the viewer, and it also I would say, makes the story interactive with the piece.
This idea of the story of loss and recovery so it’s, this is about a memory that none of us have because none of us were alive in 1914. It’s conjuring a memory which really is only available to us through stories and sightings that were recorded by people like Audubon and the great naturalists of the age. So, the interactivity was something that’s very important to me of this piece, that as viewers walk around they can conjure the image of a forest filled with trees that are just overrun with migratory passenger pigeons that are only cast in a material that is obviously not a bird itself. It’s cast off of a bird in amber.
Amber is a material that I’ve used for a number of years and it’s a material that, like many of the other materials I do, lends itself to these stories of loss and recovery. We all know from stories like “Jurassic Park” that it is a material that because of its physical properties it can preserve small things that get embedded within it. And for those of you who don’t know, amber is a material that comes from natural tree resin that is basically fossilized over years. So, as it oozes from a tree or did millions of years ago it might be coded in an insect or a piece of a leaf or sometimes even very small animals. And then hardening over time preserving that specimen or time immemorial. So, it’s a material that for various reasons has a mythology that talks about loss and recoveries and becoming that, possibly generate something.
So, I use it to make reference to that, but I also use it again for its properties in terms of how it interacts with light. When it’s lit in a particular way, those birds really kind of illuminate almost as if they have a kind of life within them, which then is lost as you walk further, and the light hits it in another way.
“Blue” is a new work of mine in which I cast two large crystal spheres, or globes we can call them, and what I did was to cast off of songbirds, the bodies of songbirds, which then make a negative impression within these what appeared to be solid crystal spheres. How I came to this piece is really through the color blue. And it came from my research on birds, what I learned while I was at Smithsonian again on this research fellowship was that the blue and bird feathers, for a long time it’s been understood that the blue in bird feathers comes from, it’s a structural color as opposed to a pigmented color.
I was really interested in the idea that these feathers are a structural color, but what I was really interested in as well is that crystal has the ability to create the structural color. And I should explain what a structural blue is. It’s a blue that comes from what’s called light scattering. So, it’s what makes the sky blue, and light scattering is a, I guess, it’s a phenomenon in which very tiny particles are suspended within the sky or within a clear material and those tiny light particles allow all of the spectra of light from the sun to pass through, with the exception of the blue spectrum. The blue spectra hit those particles and bounce back, making blue visible. But all the other spectra pass through unseen except at sunset. When the angle of the sun changes what’s happening is we’re seeing the light that’s passed through those particles as opposed to bouncing back, and those are the longest rays which are longer spectra, reds and golds and yellows. That’s what makes a sunset.
I was really struck by the fact that bird feathers, and crystal, and the sky share this ability to create structural color and so that was the beginning of this work that I started on with the crystal. So, I started about a year and a half project where I just was trying to make structural blue, and then I’ve also discovered that bird feathers do have both pigmented and structural colors that work together to make these intense blues that birds have in their feathers. So, the pieces that you see in this exhibition are the result of all of this research working with both structural blue and pigmented blue.
What I decided to do was to cast off with the bodies of songbirds and I was inspired by the Indigo Bunting, which is this intense blue songbird, that’s migratory bird as well, and that bird has significance to me because of its color. It’s migration patterns but also because it’s a bird that was really significant in the earliest advances in the 60s in migratory bird research, so there’s a lot of information to that that I won’t tell you now, but what’s significant here was just that it was a bird that kept coming back as a point of interest for me while I was doing my research, both material research and informational research.
So, these crystal spheres are filled with what are actual negative impressions of the bird bodies, of the songbirds. And the way they read, as you look through the meat of the material through this about 2-3 inches of crystal to then see the bodies of the birds which are, as I said, negative impressions. They create a hollow space within spheres otherwise appear solid. And what I wanted was for the birds to kind of read, there’s some that are closer to the surface and some that are further away from the surface and I wanted them to read almost like a topographic map within these lobes or spheres. I have two spheres, one is a lighter blue which signifies the day sky, and then there’s one that’s a much darker blue which is signifying the sky at night. That also goes back to the fact that the Indigo Bunting is a nighttime migrator, which had a lot of significance in migratory bird research as well.
So, I guess the pieces really are about this relationship that birds and particularly migratory birds have in terms of the relationship of the terrestrial and the celestial. And I was really interested in that idea, that space that exists between Earth and the sky. The birds somehow, they both can navigate both and become this kind of entity that signifies both.
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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.