The Birdsong is Deafening is an ongoing body of work that contemplates the endlessly shifting landscape between memory, loss and place. It reflects upon the relationship I have to my hometown of Cairns and the in-between spaces of growing up with a multicultural identity. On my mother’s side there is the deep quiet of Scandinavia and on my father’s the fragments of old Yugoslavia.
In the process of creating, I gathered around me the residue of memory. I consulted old creek beds I once dug holes in, bike paths I frequented, musty cane fields burning the same fires and the well-worn family albums asleep in an old fridge. I used the camera to trace over these thoughts on identity and what began as a solitary meditation slowly extended into a gentle collaboration with the land and those closest to me. I found solace in narrating a fragment of my own story with the thought that I might entangle others in its roots. And although you may not feel exactly the same poetic sentiments I have tried to steep these images in – I invite you to recall your own longings and to create dialogue between worlds that are both real and imagined, familiar and unfamiliar, here and there.
