Birdland

Jacqueline Spedding, Tea with Mrs Ward, 2019. Photograph by Ona Janzen.

BIRDLAND, MOUNT VICTORIA RAILWAY MUSEUM, BLUE MOUNTAINS, 2019

Jacqueline Spedding, Tea with Mrs Ward (detail) 2019. Photograph by Ona Janzen.

Tea with Mrs Ward, 2019. Vintage earthenware tea setting with custom ceramic decals, cast white bronze teaspoons and found materials.

Birdland, Mount Victoria Railway Museum, Mount Victoria, NSW. 9 November - 1 December, 2019.
An exhibition of contemporary artworks in response to the ornithological collection of the Mount Victoria Museum.
Artists: Emma Rooney, Jacqueline Spedding, Pamela Vaughan, and Brad Allen-Waters
Curated by Miriam Williamson.

Tea with Mrs Ward responded to the multiple uses of the site that now houses the Mount Victoria Museum in the upper Blue Mountains. The museum holds an eclectic range of materials acquired over many decades. In one corner downstairs there is a collection of dinner ware from the old tea rooms that serviced passengers coming by train from Sydney venturing west. The same room holds a rather astonishing collection of stuffed rare birds that belonged to Mr Ward. As a collector of lost and dead things myself, and a ceramicist by training, it seemed fitting to produce a tea set that payed homage to these two collections now occupying the one space.

The tea setting brought together many threads of my professional life and interests. I had recently found the remains of a satin bowerbird. Seeing its body torn to bits was heart breaking. These beautiful birds inhabit my garden and are constantly on view. The females and juveniles are green and brown and the adult males a deep blue-black with a purple beak. The males make bowers to attract the females and furnish them with a collection of found items all in a particular shade of blue. They have a wild cry and fly at great speed. Sadly these birds frequently fall prey to roaming domestic animals and are diminishing, like all our native wildlife, at a shocking rate.

I asked my friend and former museum colleague Stuart Humphreys (scientific photographer) to photograph my dead bowerbird in the same manner we photographed natural history specimens while working together. The images were transferred to ceramic decals that I fired onto a vintage tea set. Clare Tennant helped me produce a silicon mould of the bird's claw along with an old souvenir teaspoon. From these, waxes were made that I combined together and had cast into white bronze. Valerie Odewahn patiently showed me how to polish the pieces to complete the set.

Tea with Mrs Ward imagines the wife of our exotic bird collector entertaining ladies of her class with fashionable china and expensive silverware. Except the subject is not a sweet little bird from another hemisphere; it is a ravaged wild Australian native that we should take a moment to mourn. This was a truly collaborative work that was exciting to realise.

Birdland website
Tea with Mrs Ward statement