TIMO VARTIAINEN
Paraskeva’s Birds

The background to the environmental work ’Paraskeva’s Birds’ is a memory of my Karelian grandmother, Paraskeva, who loved and cherished birds – starlings, tits, skylarks and sparrows – with childlike emotion. As a young man, a birdwatcher and ‘scientist’, I found such emotion amusing; but now, in middle age, I have begun to respect my grandmother’s ‘sacred madness’.

The work consists of 20 nesting boxes which I have painted in earthy colours, and on the sides of which I have composed poems. From the evening papers I collected rubbishy texts which include words that can be considered universal: love, death, longing, princesses, kings and beggars. I chopped up the nonsense into its individual words and then reassembled them into poems which could perhaps be called Finnish karaoke verses. Can the birds read these poems? My answer is: Definitely!

These nesting boxes are also a small ecological gesture: in our modern commercial forests, birds that nest in hollow tree-trunks become homeless, so these boxes are providing a little relief to our dear birds’ housing shortage.