Bird Boxes
How making 3D birds led to my new collection of paintings, called ‘Swim’.
Part One
Once upon a time, I ordered a large amount of personalised gift boxes, embossed with my logo. I planned to send out paintings in them, and they looked fabulous indeed. I was so pleased with them. I hadn’t needed such a large amount, but to get them printed, there was a minimum order quantity.
Never mind, I thought, I’m sure I’ll use them up over time. And steadily, I did start to make a small dent in the boxes and boxes of boxes. The trouble was that kind, eco-friendly customers kept sending them back (minus their painting of course), so I could re-use them. It was like the never-ending porridge pot of gift boxes.
What CAN I do to get through all these boxes, I thought?
Fast forward about a year. There I was one gloomy afternoon, the weight of the world sitting on my shoulders. To stop myself from doom-scrolling, I was messing about with some bits of painted paper, some glue and a pair of scissors. Busy minds and all that; art is good for the soul.
My hands, cutting up old paintings from an enormous stash I keep on the shelf – colour experiments, brush wiggles, end-of-the-paint-tube sort of work - made a very rudimentary 3D bird. I liked it.
Hello, I said.
Hello, it said back.
Welcome, I said. Are there more of you?
Oh yes, replied the bird, and better than me. I am just the first, and did you notice my legs have fallen off?
Hmm, I said. That’s a problem. And then: Oooh! (as a box-shaped lightbulb went off in my head). Would you by any chance fit into one of those boxes?
The bird and I studied each other, and the bird winked: yes.
After many experimental iterations of that dear first bird, I came up with a working design for a 3D Art Bird, cunningly designed to fold elegantly into one of my boxes. I could make a whole flock! And I decided I’d sell them with a fierce instruction to please, keep the box.
Design in hand, and paper template at the ready, I set off. They were fun to make, all-consuming, and quite tricky to construct. I couldn’t stop making them. It was just so addictively difficult, and yet each one was prettier and more triumphant than the last. (And beyond that, there was no time at all for doom-scrolling).
The most intriguing aspect of making the birds wasn’t actually the way they folded to fit the box, though that was amazing, and did indeed relieve me in the end of almost every last beautiful box. No – it was the serendipity.
Serendipity is the unplanned, happy accident, the sort of luck that shows up when you’ve done enough work to recognise it showing up in the first place. You see, I’d decided to cut the pieces for the birds on the reverse of the paintings, so I couldn’t control what the end result looked like. A bit of fun, maybe.
But in reality, what started as fun turned into the whole point. The patterns on the resulting cut pieces just kept on being accidentally incredible – a feathery part of a painting ended up perfectly on a wing. An orange flash fell stupendously on a beak. A foot turned out to be fittingly bright pink, an electric stripe ran unbidden right down a back.
It felt like it was meant to be – like I was simply bringing the birds to life, not really in charge or control of their individual characters. I hung them up, one by one in my loft studio – ten, twenty, twenty five… I can’t remember how many I made in the end, from paintings, glue, split pins and a sewing machine, but I‘ve only got a few left. Most of the flock flew out of my studio and my little online shop in the few weeks before Christmas last year.
I was fizzing with excitement at the birds’ success, and bubbling over with plans to make another bigger flock, with ideas of selling them at an art fair this year. I imagined myself grinning wildly under a stand strung with paper birds; how beautiful that would be… but then I ran into two slight problems.
2020 didn’t exactly go as anyone planned.
And, I’d need to buy more boxes.
Next instalment soon: Fish Food