A Snippet from my Suburban Birds Zine

It's only a week to go until my exhibition and zine launch!

I am simultaneously excited and terrified.

And busy.  There is always more to do.

Consequently, I did not post a blog yesterday.  So decided instead, to post a snippet from my zine for your perusal.  Enjoy!  The zine will be released next Saturday (25th of November) and you can purchase it from me for $15.  OR ask your local library if they'd like to buy a copy.  It's registered with an ISBN so totally easy for them to buy.

 Me in the pink - a country kid                

Nostalgia and Sense of Self               

 

This project was born of nostalgia.  Growing up on farms one of my favourite things to do was to lie in the paddocks' long grass and wait.  Eventually, the curious cattle would move so close I could peer right up into their wet noses and grass stained grins.  I would lie prone as long as my little body could hold the suspense, then leap up chortling at the terror I unleashed in the eyes of my horrified friends.  I climbed low branched trees and perched, with pen and paper, to write poems and short fictions while watching the birds above and the sheep below.              

For a time, at a very deep level of my consciousness this aspect of my person seemed lost.  Moving to the suburbs to start a family reinforced this sense of loss.  I never expected to raise children in the suburbs.  I never expected this because I could not imagine anything more amazing than growing up in the isolated country as I did.  And I naively assumed that either I would never have children, or that somehow having children would herald a return to rural life.

So I never expected to be a suburban housewife.  Most of the previous ten years of my life near the city I lived a frenetic life: day jobs, art projects, nights filled with gigs, openings and book launches.  

   Me featured in Black Magazine -
     Crazy knitting housewife lady

But somehow I simultaneously predicted this future.  I parodied housewifery through my work at design school.  I printed scenes of my family scrap-booking.  I knitted mundane objects – like life-size lamp-posts to poke fun at the every day.  My work investigated the meditative qualities of repetition, and its relationship to the female experience.  Life in the suburbs always struck me as so banal, so boring.  And in my view of my self – an art student who made ridiculous unmarketable objects - I was neither of those things.

But there I was, another suburban housewife.  Two children in under two years, pushing a Mountain Buggy with one hand, while pulling a reluctant toddler along with the other.  It felt simultaneously unreal and like the natural trajectory of my life.  I both missed my former life, and felt grateful for the excuse (children) to no longer live it.

But the longer I stayed away from my the book launches and exhibition openings the more invisible I began to feel.  I felt an enormous sense of loss, not just in the divide between myself and my childless friends, but in my sense of self.  I have always been a creative - but becoming a Mum sapped me of creative energy.  Before pregnancy I always planned on my kids having the most amazing knitted clothing and toys.  Pregnancy stole my brain; I locked the workplace toilet key in the toilet four times, I couldn't write my own patterns any more.

 Motherhood: Completely changed my world

And once my first child was born I couldn't write poetry either.  Holding this small thing my partner and I had made and were wholly responsible for made poetry seem pretty redundant.  How could anything matter as much as this small person?  How could I ever write anything as meaningful as her existence?  I attempted writing many times and deleted every line.  It all felt so dishonest.

Whilst genuinely enjoying the journey of motherhood, this inability to create fed my anxiety.

In times of difficulty in managing my mental health I have regularly returned to gratitude.  Regular contemplation of the things you are grateful for is a researched, proven and simple method to manage depression.  And it's a method that has always worked for me.  On one of my many excursions into getting well I realised how regularly what I was most grateful for, was the birds.

 

A rosella would flit briefly into the macrocarpa tree overhanging our driveway.  A sparrow would turn its head just so and throw me a cheeky look.  A blackbird would perch on the neighbours rooftop and its sing its little heart out just to mark the coming dusk.

In discovering how much of a salve birds were to my mental state, I began to wonder why.  Why did these little brown sparrows have the capacity to impact my life so profoundly?

Photograph from Day 6

I realised it was because I felt akin to the sparrows.  As a housewife, I felt like I had become invisible.  I was there, I existed, I went places and I did things, but because of my feelings of what it meant to be 'just a housewife' I did not really exist.  The sparrows were the same.  They were everywhere, they are brown and dull.  But looking closely you come to see them as individuals.  Like us, they live their lives in patterns, but moment to moment they can be dazzling and funny and beautiful.  Capturing a bird in a moment of joy is a window into a glorious life.

Seeing this in the birds, truly seeing it, day after day began to give my life more relevance.  Not only mine, but the lives of my peers.

In writing off my suburban parenthood as invisible, I had written off the value of my friends and family who were also parents.  This was not a conscious thing.  I am a feminist.  I strongly value women's work and experience, particularly that of parents.  But my belief in the value of the varied experiences of women was meaningless if I couldn't apply it to myself.

The birds brought back the little girl laid out in the paddock.  They built the bridge back through time to the suspense before the joy of simple things.  They showed me I had the capacity to completely engage with nature where-ever I was.  Because it was part of who I was.  They helped me value my experience, and the experiences of other suburban Mums. 

Discovering the birds reconnected me to my creative self.

 Fantail - drawing from earlier this week

On My Suburban Birds Project

So there's a reason why I haven't blogged in ages, and it's not just because I'm working and have small kids and try to sleep as much as I possibly can during the small windows available to me (although those are rather large factors).  At the moment I'm working on a year long project where I take photographs of local birds every day.

 And by every day I mean every single day.  It means literally every day.  Today was day 71, and whilst today wasn't an amazing day photographically I still did it.

So why am I doing this you ask?

Well, the idea came out of me doing one of my thirty days of gratitude shticks on Facebook.  It's where every day, for thirty days, I came up with three things I'm grateful for.  Because I'd been a bit down about life generally, and gratitude is a proven method of curing depression.  Whilst doing this, I discovered I was often looking toward nature around our house and feeling grateful for it.  I also started taking photographs a little more of what I saw so I could illustrate these small but powerful things brightening my life.

At a deeper level, Suburban Birds is a reflection of my own suburban life.  I never expected to be a suburban housewife.  Never in a million years.  Having grown up in the country, I kind of anticipated returning to it as a grown up.  Which is weird, considering I have no skills with which to provide a means to support myself in the country.  Anyhow.  I also never expected to be a wife to anyone, let alone a mother.  So whilst I love where I am and what I do, when I step back and look at it sometimes it seems a bit strange.

But that's only when I look at it from the perspective of an outsider looking in - a stranger.  Someone making assumptions based on pre-designated ideas about what it means to be a suburban housewife.  I imagine those people might see us as swarms of Mountain Buggied yoga pants wearing decaf drinking ladies trying to work off those bonus baby bumps.  Or maybe as an attache to our partners living their successful lives outside the home.  Or maybe they don't even see us at all.

And it was the invisibility aspect of things which I really associate with birds.  People almost never
even think about birds in the suburbs.  Especially not the grey/brown birds like the sparrows and pigeons.  But they are always there.  If you just sit still and listen at almost any point in time during the day you will hear them.  And if you look, you'll see them too.  And whilst at first glance, all may seem alike given time you come to notice their differences.  Not just in species, but in age, colour, body tone, flight pattern, song.  In time they all become individuals just trying to live their lives alongside us.  And they are beautiful and funny and unique and amazing.

All of them.  Not just the native birds NZ is famous for but the imports too.  The sparrows, the thrushes, the blackbirds the mynas.  Even the pigeons.  All of them.  They are all part of the landscape and soundscape that form the backdrop of our lives.

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When I started this project I expected it to be another thirty day Facebook project.  Then after a few weeks I realised I needed maybe 100 days.  But then realised I needed more.  Because every single day doing this one simple thing was helping me feel connected with the world I live in.  And there is just so much to see.

Today was not an amazing day.  On a Thursday I usually take photographs near a few bridges over Opanuku Stream, but it was too rainy for this to be feasible to do in work gear.  So I just took some pictures of Southern black backed gulls on the council buildings whilst I waited for my bus home from work.  But what you can't see here is how on my afternoon break I tried to take photos.  I went into the bush and found a pukeko too fast for my camera.  I tried to spot wildlife over the stream standing on the wobbly metal overbridge and heard birds hiding out from the rain, but spotted nothing.  I went outside into the world and looked around.

And this looking has resulted in all kinds of things.  I've had a conversation with a woman who discovered a magical spot at the same time as me.  She took off her shoes and walked down to some rocks under a bridge to look at the wildlife and to ask me what she was doing.  She was from New Lynn and had lived there for fifteen years.  She had only been to Henderson a handful of times.  It is not easy to describe, but it was a special meeting.  And it occurred less than 20 metres from Alderman Drive Pak N Save.

One day whilst perusing local bush by the mall I spotted what I thought was a homeless persons possession stash.  On closer inspection, at a later point in time I discovered it was actually discarded stolen objects.  Empty bags and purses, a glasses case, a low value jersey.

On Sunday I interrupted someone sleeping in the bush.  It was an awkward moment.  We were very close to throngs of people, yet a world away.  Consequently we each were frightened of how the other would react.  And, much like the birds I try to capture on film, he ran away before I could apologise to him, for my presence in what is normally maybe a safe place to take a kip.

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 At this stage, I'm planning on doing this for a year and taking stock from there.  I don't know what it will result in.  Maybe an exhibition?  Maybe a zine?  Maybe a calendar?  I'm not sure.  I haven't approached anyone yet and I won't be any time soon.  I am tweeting my pictures because I think the idea of tweeting about birds is hilarious and this is the only reason I use Twitter.  And maybe somewhere out there in 'real' bird land might have some ideas or insight. 

What I do know is that this is good for me.  And it's good for my family.  Murray can't not notice birds now.  He knows all the best places to spot them between our house the the train station now.  He's even taken some photographs himself.  He is far better at bird spotting than I am (pros of 20 20 vision). And we've found an amazing spot to take the kids to 'go look at ducks'.  They love it.

This gives me piece of mind.  It gives me something outside of my suburban life and home, whilst bring something so much part of my suburban life and home.

I think birdwatching could be the next big thing in curing depression.  But even that's not the point.  The point is to see what is living around you.  Because one you see it, it's hard to unsee.