about Bird needs shelter
2009/22
project
In 2009, I started the Birds Need Shelter project. This project focuses on how we treat nature. How we have placed ourselves outside of nature and seem to approach it only in terms of its usefulness to us: what we can eat or otherwise use. We have depleted nature and, as a result, species have become extinct or seriously endangered, and the climate is changing, leading to major ecological problems worldwide.
Why is it so difficult to simply coexist with animals and plants? Why are industry and business always given free rein? Why do we pay so little attention to the consequences of our choices? And to what extent is the latter even possible anymore, now that it is so difficult to find out which raw materials are used in products, where they come from, how they are extracted and what damage is caused in the process?
The structure of Birds Need Shelter is formed by four imaginary characters, each representing a different way of approaching life: hunter, gastronome, scientist, and artist. For the hunter, I approached the bird from the perspective of the hunter and how you can control and dominate nature. For the gastronome, I looked for ways to prepare poultry and enjoy the taste of their meat. For the scientist, I considered the bird from an ornithological scientific perspective, to collect species and categorize them into systems and tables. And for the artist, I approached the bird from a poetic point of view and gave space to my admiration for their beauty and their ability to fly.
To realize this project, I spent a year conducting research in Paris, where I was granted access to the depots of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle. In addition, I was allowed to photograph the legacy of one of the last private Dutch ornithologists and was able to take photos in the depots of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam and the Zoological Museum of St. Petersburg.
In these museum depots, I was confronted with the overwhelming collecting mania of the 19th and early 20th centuries. There, I also saw how specimens are preserved, and the contrast between the care with which birds are mounted in their natural posture and the steel racks in which they are stored “as merchandise” was staggering. There I also took a rather cruel series of photographs of bird heads in formalin, which evoked associations with products in Weck jars.
Over the years, I have also collected a lot of other material in antiquarian bookshops and at markets, including books on ornithology, gastronomy, hunting, and taxidermy. And after my stay in Paris, I continued to visit natural history museums, including those in Nantes, Lille, London, Brussels, Berlin, Bern, Basel, and Cairo, where I always found new material.
In 2022, I was able to photograph notes and objects from the estate of Dutch ethologist Niko Tinbergen in the depot of the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Wilmering's œuvre comprises projects, installations, collages, photography, paintings and text works. He also produces numerous artists' books. In his work, he continually investigates, not without humour, his position as both person and artist. The mirror-effect between the artist and his public is an important element in his work. In his collages, he takes his images out of context in the same way as he repeatedly takes himself, as an artist, out of the context of general artistic practice. Photography is a recurring element within his different series.
His photography, his various collage series, paintings, installations, multiples and books are all born of his feeling that reality consists of “pretty aimless chains of coincidences and absurd situations, in which it's easy to lose your way”.
His works are constructed from pseudo-events, stories that run parallel to reality, in which he has made sudden shifts and enlargements.
In his work, all collages are invariably made by hand. He cuts out images and integrates them with other pictures, as neatly as possible and always according to the correct perspective of the photo. Wilmering wilfully makes no use of Photoshop and remarks: “The time-consuming work involved in making these collages is for me a statement for 'slow art' and a humanistic sense of proportion.”
Luuk Wilmering's project, Bird needs shelter, was largely created during his work period in the Holsboer studio in Paris. Bird needs shelter is concerned with the duplicitous character of man's dealings with nature. In this four-part series, birds and our relationship with them form the central subject. The series shows how man, through 'abuse of power', causes the extinction of certain species, how birds are hunted and how they should be properly served and eaten. However, the series also shows the possibilities of escape: the Egghouses and the birds that disappear into nature and are cut out and doubled by the artist.
The structure of the work is defined by four imaginary figures each of whom stands for a certain mentality: the gastronome, the scientist, the hunter and the artist. Around these characters, Wilmering has spent two years making four installations, which connect and refer to each other. For this project, which is not yet completed, he has realized more than a hundred drawings, coloured-in photos, designs and collages, and has made hundreds of photos, including many taken in the Musée national d'Histoire Naturelle.
Marieke Wiegel, 2011 (in Une histoire naturelle)
Luuk Wilmering