Artist and Designer Anne Fredericks will curate a show at The Berkshire Botanical Garden
Bird Necessities: Outdoor Installations by Artists and Designers
June 11 through labor day
opening reception: June 11 th from 5:30 – 7:00 pm
tickets are $ 25 and can be purchased from the Berkshire Botanical website: http://www.berkshirebotanical.org/events/index.html
This exhibition explores ways to provide birds with food, shelter, habitat and the artful assistance in attaining them. Curator and artist Anne Fredericks is joined by Naomi Blumenthal, Dale Culleton and Jon Piasecki.
All of the participants in this show are active members of the Berkshire community and have a special feeling for the terroir. As citizens, they have worked in different areas to preserve aspects of our local environment: tree species, view-scapes, gardens, historic sites, and indigenous woodland environments. As artists, they have each developed a personal oeuvre that is deeply rooted in nature.
For more information call: (413) 298-3926
I began hanging out bits of yarn and string for the birds to use in their nests when I was a young girl in Michigan. I delighted in finding the colors neatly woven into the fabric of the nests when the autumn came along.
When I moved to Massachusetts in the early 1990’s, I often found nests on my farm with the cornflower blue yarn that the young neighborhood girls used to braid their horses and pony manes with for the local horse shows. I would also find long fibers from blue tarps in the nests-the birds had unraveled some of the tarps that covered the wood pile. It was then that I revived the practice of putting out yarn, string, old fabric scraps, netting and tinsel in small ‘pavilions’ that I hung form the trees each spring. This is the background for the show that I was asked to curate this summer for the Berkshire Botanical Garden.
For the show, I designed and fabricated 3 copper pavilions to hang high in an old apple tree at the garden. As the limb I was using was quite high, I oversized the pavilions to create the right effect. In addition to the same things I put in my smaller pavilions, there was lots of room to add horsehair collected over the winter, sheep’s wool collected from our paddock, raffia and chamomile stems from my herb garden. Nothing goes to waste, nothing needed to be purchased.
Fabric scraps from design projects-cut and tied to be used in a ‘pavilion’
Raffia, cotton batting, linen scraps , and recycled produce nets in process
The pavilions in process in my Botanica where I work on plant based projects, and where I process my herbs and store winter vegetables
Tying off the pavilions in the apple tree -I had two fantastic Eagle Scouts help me with the knots and hanging the pavilions safely. My husband Marc Fasteau and photographer Tom Zetterstrom
Inspecting the hanging pavilions
All finished-swaying in the breeze and already attracting the interest of wrens who have been choosing items for their nests
Anne G Fredericks is the curator for the current show at the Berkshire Botanical Garden entitled: ” Bird Necessities: Outdoor Installations by Artists”. This exhibition explores ways to provide birds with food shelter habitat and artful assistance in attaining them.
Along with Anne the other artists are Naomi Blumenthal, Dale Culleton, and Jon Piasecki. All of the participants in this show are active members of the Berkshire Community and have a special feeling for the terroir.
As citizens they have worked in different areas to preserve aspects of our local environment: tree species, view-scapes, gardens, historic sites, and indigenous woodland environments. As artists, they have each developed a personal oeuvre that is deeply rooted in nature.
The exhibit will be on view from Memorial day until Labor Day. The opening party is Saturday June 11, 5:30-7:30.
For more information go to: http://www.berkshirebotanical.org
By Kate Abbott from the Berkshire Eagle
