My subject matter has gradually shifted to include landscapes and birds as markers of memory, place, culture and identity. In this particular body of work the birds have been taken out of the landscape and have become isolated where they are now being spliced and hybridised - African and North American birds become one new species. Physical peculiarities are combined into one new creature. I believe that this hybridisation parallels the immigrant experience where immigrants maintain a core of their original cultural experience and identity, but their identity gets spliced with new cultural experiences, vocabularies, world views and identities into a new hybrid identity. These images merge visually separate images and in turn recall the merging of other, more subtle concepts implied within the work: violence, separation and mourning, acceptable and unacceptable, same and different, memory and place. These birds are also more intentional versions of the surrealist “exquisite corpses”: both accidental monster and contrived curiosity. “Normal” becomes questioned.
