Repetitious Shuttlecock

A friend once said to me that the difference between writing and drawing is that you can never draw the same thing twice, as it will always be different in some way. He used sparrows as an example. Despite humanity’s contentious relationship with sparrows, I have always found them quite endearing. This work was made up of an old surveyor’s map of North Queensland, cut into small square pieces. Sparrows were drawn onto every square, each one slightly different to the next. The images were embellished with an assortment of anecdotes such as: He didn’t want to go to bed because he knew she was there; There were no results upon Googling his name; and Her heart was more dislocated than her elbow.

Much like ‘Hemry Didn’t Care for Domestic Animals’, this work was too self-indulgent. The incorporated text anthropomorphised the sparrows with statements that truly had nothing to do with them, or their plight.