Common Birds
Femininity has been placed under the spotlight since the beginning of time, all dents and surfaces explored as they hide away the necessary process of transition under blankets of shadows and blinding lights. She has been inside gilded frames; her weaknesses and strengths are spectacles to be captured in folktales, carved into cave walls, sculpted out of wood or stone, and paraded as a substantive feature of developing civilizations.
She has been a healer, a Madonna, an insatiable queen. A paragon of virtue yet also the bearer of sin.
Rocks were thrown and stakes were burned, flowers were given and dances were offered. .
She has played and fought to set foot on pedestals, yet nature thrives best in wilderness and this wilderness she has been frequently deprived. The rawness of it is too overwhelming to be acknowledged even by her own kind. The result is a subconscious longing for the innate, a centuries-old hunger, or a search for the subtlest form of release.
“Common Birds” is an exploration of the seemingly mundane yet integral aspects of what constitutes the human qualities of womanhood. It is an attempt to alleviate the stigma through inclusion and the depiction of organic (often seen as "wild") attributes that reveal paradoxically fascinating truths. Behind rough strokes and fine details is a reaffirmation that in between walking upright and running with the beasts, between intellect and instinct, the feminine spectrum is as broad, untameable, and natural as the weight of the world.