niamhfentonart-blog

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Cardboard VS Nature

Since the main Doocot I made was a mix of homeless shelter and pigeon house I wanted to see if my plain pigeon houses could survive outside, just like the cardboard that many members of the homeless community use for bedding and shelter. They don’t treat the cardboard with anything special and just use it how it is, so I thought this would be a good representation of the sort of materials they might have.

I placed the cardboard houses in the small wood like area behind Harris Academy as there used to be some makeshift shelters out in that area. Below are images from the first night that they were out there.

It had nearly been one month since I had put the cardboard Doocots outside when I went to collect them. I first thing I noticed was that the cardboard itself had gained a lot of water. It was sagging and dirtied by whatever was living in it. I then noticed than many snails and creepy crawlies had taken up residence. These small bugs living in the houses amused me as it showed that they were shelter to these animals. I was impressed that no one had moved them or vandalised them.

I moved one of the houses out into the open to see if that would affect how much damage would happen to it. Below you can see that the roof had completely given in. Many panels had fallen off and it looked much worse, this could be due to the fact there was now no trees or greenery to protect it or that some school children or large animal had moved it. Either way it shows how vulnerable the shelters become when in the open. After a month not much damage had been done to the houses when they were under the protection of the trees but when exposed (even if it was for one night) the shelters got destroyed. This makes me think that the shelters that the homeless community build must be very temperamental as they are always exposed to the elements and other people.

This experiment with the cardboard proves to me that it is not safe or comfortable for people to use it as shelter. It may provide initial safety, but it soon starts to weather and become very weak. Its inhuman. It’s so sad that people live in conditions like this. I truly wish that there was more shelters and spaces for them to be safe in, so they wouldn't have to live like this.

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Doocot Designs

Wanting to go back to see if my message could be understood easier I went to researching artists that focus on shocking pieces of art relating to the homelessness problem. The first artist I looked at was Maxwell Rushton.

His ‘Left Out’ piece was very powerful to me as it featured a bin bag in the shape of a person from when Rushton mistook a big bag for a homeless person after work one day. It was left on the streets and people reactions were recorded. To me it’s a striking piece as it shows the throw away mentality on something so precious as life. It was shocking to see how many people just looked at it and walked on. Completely disregarding this persons life. It seems no one wanted to help selflessly apart from a couple few, just like the reactions from people in the city centre about the pigeons.

I linked his website as he is truly an inspiring artist.

maxwellrushton.com/projects/left-out/

The next artist I looked at was Michael Rakowitz. He started a project in 1998 and it is currently on-going. The project is called paraSITE. He built custom inflatable shelters for homeless people to attach to building vents to inflate them and heat, keeping the person inside safe and warm.  He focuses on the idea of using something that is being thrown away to help house people and keep them safe since many homeless shelters have been getting shutting down due to the government.

The lack of housing for homeless people is getting ridiculous. Homeless population have soared in many areas including my old home, Manchester. There is homeless people on every street and most the housing and soup kitchens have closed due to cuts so people like Rakowitz would be amazing in Manchester. His project would save lives in Manchester but he probably would not be allowed to put them up as they would ‘litter the streets’. Aesthetics are more important than lives in a tourist based city. 

These structures are better than sleeping with cardboard, even though cardboard is insulating. You see many homeless people sleeping with reused cardboard in the cities. I wondered if I could make a structure from cardboard like artist Nathan Coley. When he made his replicas of religious buildings in Edinburgh.

http://studionathancoley.com/

I thought it would interesting to have a homeless shelter to be made from cardboard or similar thrown away materials.

I wanted to look at Pigeon housing too as I know that many pigeon fanciers keep pigeons in Doocots. Glasgow has many on the borders however I realised that only pure breed, fancy pigeons can live in it. There has been many campaigns on Kickstarter to get common doocots but most projects fail getting funded even ones that got the press and public involved have been failing. Project Pigeon was one that failed massively and was a play performed in a pigeon loft. It never reached its goal.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1932652717/project-pigeon-theatre

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-20298807

I thought it would shocking if on my Doocot I included bird spikes. They are used to prevent PEST birds from perching and landing on a surface. Pigeon spikes are the most commonly used. I thought since I was doing a run down doocot like a homeless shelter I would include them to show that the building has gone unforgiving and cruel. 

Link to Bird Spikes website is below.

https://birdteq.co.uk/service/bird-proofing/bird-spikes/

I also wanted to include some of the words in the building from the pigeon survey and the homeless survey. I thought a graffiti style was appropriate since the drawings and words are normally painted on public buildings by disgruntled members of public. Since people who write it are normally disagreeing with the city and shelters are city buildings I thought it complemented well. As if one of the reasons it shut was because of the graffiti against it.

I then tried to make a doocot like my other two normal doocots.

This was made with cardboard, wire and acrylic paint. I had to bend the wire into each spike and attach it then paint the graffiti. I added posters like my ‘Don't feed the pigeons’ on the outside to make it seem like the closure was real. Overall I think my Homeless Doocot was impactful and fun enough to have an interest in from a far.

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Trending: Dundee Pigeon Girl

So, things escalated. It all started with Edwina Ashton. Ashton is a London based artist that makes sculptures, videos and drawings on absurd, unbelievable characters. She does many live performances where she acts as an animal and does ordinary things in public. Ashton loves surrealism but also loves pairing the surreal with the all to real. It gets peoples attention to the work and issue at hand and sometimes even brings in humour. These are some of her outfits from performance pieces.

I wanted to try this with the pigeons, to see if peoples opinions towards pigeons would be associated to me if I dressed as one. I set about becoming a humanoid pigeon.

I first constructed a beak. This was my prototype. Made from heavy paper and masking tape. There was a couple of problems. One it didn't properly fit on my face. Secondly, it couldn't open and was a bit to small for the proportions of a human face to pigeon.

Here is the final beak. It is made quite similarly. I used heavy paper and electrical tape to construct the main form as one piece like the prototype. I then cut the bottom jaw free and altered its shape. It was then painted with normal acrylic paints. After it dried I used twist pins to make the jaw animated. It fit well on my face. I could hold it on with tape inside the beak but for the performance I used elastic bands as it held better in windy Dundee.

I then made my tail feathers.

I even made hair feathers for my hair the same way. The clips help hold them in.

These are some photos from my performance in the city centre. I went into the Overgate shopping centre and wandered like a pigeon while still going around like normal including going into Tesco and Greggs. I then fed the pigeons outside the church. I got some commenters that were quite confused about it all. Quite a few ‘What the f***’s’ and only one or two positive comment. I guess people thought I was weird, dressing as a dirty, hated bird. But that is only the start of it.

Someone had spotted me and posted a video on a public snapchat to Dundee. It had quickly been seen  by hundreds, thousands.

The next influx of a response was Twitter. Someone had screen recorded the video and it exploded. Below is the link to the people who tweeted me.

 https://twitter.com/euanlean/status/1059775315336142848?s=21

I managed to get 150k views and 1.2k retweets (or re-coos since I'm a pigeon) which was an awful for me however it was getting me out there and I was starting to see peoples responses. Most were disgusted and confused but all were interesting to see. Here is some of them.

I thought this would be the end of it. It proved my point that the idea of someone being a pigeon was disgusting and vile but then this was published and I turned viral.

https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/scottish-news/3463097/dundee-pigeon-birds-niamh-fenton/

www.deadlinenews.co.uk/2018/11/09/what-the-f-is-going-on-in-dundee-as-a-girl-is-seen-feeding-pigeons-dressed-as-a-pigeon/

It was an interesting article to say the least. After telling my mum she told me that I had been in the paper from our home town in a handmade pigeon costume before. Even thought this isn't strictly related I thought it funny. I am now included in the WikiNow for Dunblane too.

https://www.wikinow.co/topic/dunblane

After everything I think this performance piece was definitely good at getting peoples attention however it may have not conveyed what I wanted it to therefore I decided to develop this idea more. Here is a brief video of me trying to fly. There is now more videos on new media sites too.

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Pige-rans

Signage around city centres sparked these sketches. Signs such as ‘Don’t feed the pigeons’ interested me. Like I said in a previous post, Pigeons are veterans. Pigeon veterans, Pige-rans if you will. They were celebrated, icons of heroism and peace and now are dirty and diseased, something people fear and despise. Having signs that stop pigeons eat was strange to me. I know they were put there to keep away rats and keep the streets clean but the streets are home for most pigeons. Not feeding the bird would stop them surviving. They would die out. They would have to scavenge and beg. This notion reminded me of the homeless community once again. 

If signs like ‘Do not feed the pigeons’ were put up about human beings then people may be a bit outraged, shocked even. The sign could be put up for the same reason as the pigeons, keep streets clean and tidy, to get rid of them. I ran with this idea and drew up some sketches.

I loved the idea of a pigeon begging with a sign. This is a painting done with acrylic paint, A5 size. Bringing humanity to the pigeon is very real and you may not notice the pigeon face at first but the sign as people tend to not look at someone in the eyes when begging. It’s weird seeing a bird like this use words to get food.

I drew a proper veteran pigeon, with WW1 uniform and the Dickin Medal which was awarded to pigeons for their bravery and service during the war. I think its interesting to have this strong, powerful image of a pigeon next to the begging, homeless pigeon.

I then wanted to try out humans with pigeon like features; beck, wings, tail etc. The merging of human and bird I thought was relevant as they both have the same struggles and disregard towards them. This reminded me of Edwina Ashton’s works so I thought I would expand on this later.

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Waxy Waypoint

Originally, I wanted to focus on the words from the survey and try and make the pigeons physically disappear as people saw them as such a useless waste of space. The act of making something disappear is interesting as you have to physical move or destroy something to get it out of sight. Once out of sight has it disappeared, or has it just been moved?

I thought that I could make a candle to melt inspired by the Swiss artist Urs Fischer. Fischer focuses on dark or twisted themes and the passage of time. He immortalises the event by allowing the viewer to see it melt and disappear. It stays alive in people’s memories. Below is a full-size wax replica of Giambologna’s 16th-century sculpture ‘The Rape of the Sabine Women’. This was part of a sell-out exhibition in which Fischer melted many life sizes candles. This horrific candle was contradicted by his other works such as ‘Everyday Man’ which were shown at the same exhibition, gazing in at the replica candle. As if ignoring what is happening in the sculpture and overlooking the brutality. It’s important as it shows that the event will never go away or fade even once the candle was fully melted.

I took two approaches to making a candle pigeon. The first included me finding a bird candle and repainting it to resemble a pigeon more closely using acrylic paint. I found the paraffin wax was very easy to mould as I could indent the premade candle with little effort. So I decided to try and sculpt my own out of a large paraffin candle and base it on a pigeon I had photographed earlier in the week. This turned out to be harder than I thought.

This is the repainted christmas candle which was named ‘Fred’. Fred was quite a good representation of a pigeon but I still wanted to try and make my own, from scratch.

This head of a pigeon was carved from a large candle with lino tools. One side of the head has a wash of grey acrylic paint on it. I wanted to see if it would enhance the head however I ended up prefering the plain white pigeon head more than the washed side. I still kept the washed side to see how it would melt. I then went outside and burnt my candle. It took 50.32 minutes to burn completely. It was a struggle as it would sometimes produce a lot of smoke and would sometimes die out which made me have to tamper with it to keep it burning.

These are the results of it burning. It made a beautiful pattern and almost looks like a peacock. The wax flowed in such a way to make it look mystical. I also thought it was interesting how the candle didn’t fully disappear instead it morphed into something else, something more interesting to look at. It completely went against my original idea to make the pigeon form disappear.

The bottom of the now melted candle was interesting too. The candle had picked up the imprint of the ground it sat on and it left a slight mark on the ground where it had been sat. It, in my opinion, never fully left. It impacted the place it had been, it had physically left its mark even if people won’t know why there is a mark there it will remain. It shows that both the object and the thing it was on would forever be impacted by its presence even if it was temporary.

This experiment showed me that the smallest things can impact the biggest things.

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The Survey Says...

Opinions of pigeons apparently vary a lot. When I was in town I discovered quite quickly that people tend to not see pigeons in a good light at all. I thought was weird as pigeons have such a positive history with humans. 

It dates back centuries that pigeons have aided humans, Romans even used pigeons as carriers of messages and important information. In the 1800′s pigeons were used in France as part of the postal services. In the war they were used to keep communications up with the allies over the enemies territory. Thousands of pigeons died keeping up the vital communications, they were heroes so why do people see them so differently now? They are now hated veterans. 

These pages have words on them from people I asked in town on their opinions of pigeons. Most people described them badly as I had originally thought. Some words got me thinking. Underdog, common and waste of space. This reminds me of another group: The homeless. This article contains a word cloud made by the general public by a news company and one of the words is the same, waste of space. So maybe the homeless community are underdogs too?

https://www.thejournal.ie/homeless-word-cloud-1699776-Oct2014/

Another realisation was that some of the homeless community is made up from veterans. (11% of homeless people are veterans.) They served our country, they were heroes yet now opinions have changed and they are seen as a ‘waste of space’ so are they are the same as pigeons. Maybe pigeon is a umbrella term now for heroes turned homeless.

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Uptown Gulls

Venturing into town I went on a hunt for pigeons. To me pigeons are intriguing birds and so personable. Each pigeon is different to the other in subtle ways however people tend to see them as all the same. I thought I would study them for their different personalities and their actions.

Food. I learn quite quickly that to get the birds to look at me I needed to tempt them. I was looking for a range of movements so I had to get them food. There was no bird seed so I had to get bread. After I fed them I found that the bread is actually bad for the bird and expands in their stomach causing them to be sick, yet they still eat it gladly. I found this interesting as it reminds me of humans overindulging and making themselves sick. It’s weird how these birds, to me, are so human.

Below is work by Kristen Meyer. She uses natural, organic materials to sculpt geometric artificial shapes. She has a minimalist yet detailed style, focusing on the naturally occurring breaks in the objects. The juxtaposition between the material and the design is beautiful and perfected in her style. She allows the texture and colour of the original object to help manipulate the shape of the final piece. I wanted to know if I could ‘sculpt’ the pigeons into forming this sort of unnatural shape. 

I found it was much harder to move the pigeons into a specific geometric shape. It wasn't the pigeons fault but by the time I had arranged the food the sea gulls would come and disperse the group of pigeons that would form. The pigeons seemed to be less competitive for the food and allowed the gulls to take what they want. It seemed like they were resided to the idea of gulls stealing their food.

 I decided that if I wanted to try this again I would need to some how get rid of the gulls or maybe try and form the shape another way. But is that mean? To priorities one bird over the other? 

Here’s a video of them losing their food.

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Close encounters.

Columba livia or the common city pigeon is one of the most common birds in Britain. They are built to survive. In America they are considered the number one bird pest problem and, in the UK, there is currently many organisations which try to cut down the population and stop them spreading.

I always knew that they carry illness and give off a general dirty aura but to me pigeons are much more. They are resilient, adaptable and persistent. I say that the common city pigeon is my favourite bird because it has always inspired me to be better, even if a pigeon is missing a leg it will hop after your bread. That sort of determination is admirable.

So, I went to the city center and tried to get some photos of them. See how they move, turns out they are quite friendly.