IN PLAIN SIGHT

TREE EATING BARK (2025)

What disappears when seen just right,

yet shelters what never arrives?

A house wears its host’s skin,

waiting to vanish from one point of view.

The work takes the form of a birdhouse painted to seamlessly mimic the bark of the tree behind it, rendering it nearly invisible from a precise vantage point. Installed in line with a screen showing a pre-recorded video of the same tree, the work created a doubling effect: the viewer could never be sure whether they were looking at the actual tree, its mediated image, or the camouflaged object disappearing into both.

What seems at first like a simple structure becomes a perceptual trick. The birdhouse vanishes into its host, blurring the boundaries between object and environment, nature and illusion. At the same time, the video loop inserts another layer of reality, complicating the act of looking and positioning the viewer’s perception at the center of the work.

second tree from the left

Uus Rada Gallery

acrylic medium

About The Birds was a group exhibition at Uus Rada, curated by the platform isthisit?. The project explored the house sparrow — a bird that is at once familiar, widespread, and often considered an invasive pest. Using the sparrow as a starting point, the exhibition engaged with ideas of home, transformation, and adaptation.

Each participating artist was invited to work with a custom-built wooden birdhouse designed for sparrows, and to respond to it in relation to their own practice. This approach allowed for new works that both reflected ongoing artistic concerns and opened a dialogue with the sparrow’s ubiquity and resilience.

Photographs taken by Bob Bicknell-Knight