papers, birch bark, copper thread, other thread, string, gold, nests from Melinda’s card, ink, coloured pencils, graphite, cut outs from books, 21 1/2 x 17 inches.

This artwork looks better in real life.  It is less brazen.   “Little Homes”  is named such because there are lots of birds nests in this tree.  Each one is placed mostly where it might be found in the wild.   Of course, a tree is home to many more lives than just birds, but this artwork is limited to the bird family.  The background was an idea for the inside of another artwork I was trying to make called “Insular Perception of Vaster Things” (a too complicated name which I want to change). The idea behind the rainbow clock is that this is our human perception of the world: we see colour in a colour wheel, we mark time with a clock, and we also perceive shape and space in circles, rectangles, and triangles.  Here are some ways that we humans make sense of what is actually nonsense around us.  No one else (birds or trees or etc.) sees the world like this, so it probably is not true.  However, trees and nest making both do follow concrete rules of nature. The rainbow clock, though conceptually incompatible,  felt magnificent behind my little tree.   Today, our two worlds pretend to co-exist, but as in this artwork, the humans overpower the rest.  (For now.) 

On another note, I saw the Giuseppe Penone exhibition at the Serpentine and was amazed to see my little tree so evocative of his outside enormous bronze and gold tree.   It is important to note that  I made Little Homes without any knowledge of his work.  

On a third note, this little tree is part of a tree series that I have been adding to for 25 years now.  I was very honoured when at the time I was making this,  my son Noah did a project on trees for his AP photography class.