Terra is conceived as a shared table where we gather, a site of interaction. Storytelling here becomes a bridge between anthropocentric perspectives and avian behaviors, offering a response to experiences that resist formal description. Text fragments placed on the ground where city birds forage for crumbs invite visitors to “pick–read” scattered text, blurring the line between reading and feeding.
Wok employs iterative reading, deconstruction, and reassembly of narrative, distilled into concise texts that take the form of parables, scientific observations, and quotations. These fragments respond to the brevity of contemporary attention spans, while ceramics and text function together as vessels of memory and recollection. By embracing vulnerability and partial surrender, the work opens a liminal space in which human and avian forms converge.
The movement within the work magnifying and diminishing mirrors the rhythms of thoughts, shifting between broad and focused arcs. This oscillation seeks to reveal insights that unsettle ideological structures and invite reflection on interconnectedness. Absurdity becomes a tool to pierce the numbness of modern life: in an age where repetition dulls our senses, disruption even in absurd form can awaken us. Terra ultimately asks us to consider our shared trajectory: how we shape the world, and how, in return, the world shapes us.
What are you doing here?
Bird watching
not to snatch them,
or confine them,
not to own them,
or empty them,
nor to define them,
or fix them in a frame,
or shape them to a human name.
No, none of these! I watch them because their wings are closely connected to their nerves and muscles, and because they constitute a whole universe of expression forever denied by man.
Because they are both primal and intellectual!
It had no culture beyond the marrow-carved memory of its kind. Yet it knew! From something older, a programming etched into the double helix long before human walked upright. The seeds of the apple carried toxins; the skin, waxen and dense, offered no nutrient worth the effort, unworthy of its beak. It pecked past both with the precision of a creature honed by million failed generations.
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The mere presence of a predator is enough to alter prey behavior. Even a non consumptive predator one that does not strike can exert a profound effect. The response is not to the act of hunting, but to the anticipation of it. The prey reacts not to violence, but to the knowledge that a hunter is near, within the margins of range and time.
This awareness alone induces fear, and from that fear arises stress, imbalance, and disruption of natural patterns: feeding, resting, mating, moving. In such conditions, survival is no longer shaped solely by teeth and claws, but by the quiet tyranny of possibility.
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All the Forest reports say you are from Avalon.
Yes! But my ancestors lived here for centuries. Different day, year, weight, climate, diet. No wonder their first several generations had low fertility. Nevertheless, they survived; in the end, they flourished.
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Sparrows are social folks they do not walk, they hop.
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Sometimes doves do make sturdier nests. One factor that determines whether a nest is poorly or well constructed is what it is built on.
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Look, this pigeon’s leg is tied with a piece of hair, and the toe is gone! It’s beyond recovery.
I cut the hair, thinking I had freed a pigeon. Tomorrow it will go and stumble into another one, because it is common, and to be caught simply.
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The seagull will not give up the sea.
The grutto will not give up on wetlands and mudflats.
But they all did!
Why would any bird give up such privilege?
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A hummingbird’s heart beats up to 1,200 times per minute, while for pigeons it is about 600. They flutter their wings 80 times per second. In fact, they do not flap but swirl them in a figure-eight, making it look infinite.
We are each other’s environment. We cannot separate ourselves from one another, even if we try.
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How could nations that loved birds so dearly, that saw them as symbols of freedom, spirit, and beauty, also catch them, cage them, cook them? How could hands that once reached toward the sky in admiration now reach to pluck feathers, twist necks, set them upon the plate!
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Bird track.
Bird summon.
Birds vanish when they must.
Each day birds wake as seekers.
And in seeking they find.
Headline: Pick-your-own-cherry event got cancelled because they picked all the cherries.
Maybe the human mind had outpaced the body, leaving behind a husk that still reached, still acted, still fed itself without asking why. Maybe that was why contradictions no longer felt like contradictions at all. We have learned to hold reverence in one hand and detachment in the other.
She felt it then the weight pressing beneath her ribs.
Ahhh straighten your shoulders. Square the stance. Look ahead!
“Be representative.”
This project was funded by CBK Rotterdam and P. M. de Klerk Ceramic Fund, Het Cultuurfonds, The Netherlands.
