About seven years ago, when my Grandma Thompson was still alive and I was still in Florida, I found several of these little bluebirds half buried in her back yard. I'd been making art with rescued materials for a long time by then, so I plucked the little birds from the dirt and took them home. They came with me to Minnesota, and since the move I had used all but this last one, whose tail was broken when I found her and had to be glued. Over the past couple days I worked out this design and assembled it; it's one of the smallest of this series of works at about 6" high.
All my salvaged-object pieces are about hope and comfort, even when they're also about a lot of other things. There's a meaning for me in choosing to use materials and items which have been deemed 100% worthless, either by being abandoned, forgotten, or outright discarded. It feels like a way to honor all the parts of our own selves which have taken a beating or been neglected or deemed unimportant.
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