“Soweto Shacks”

Functional Birdhouses – 2017-2019

Soweto Shacks is a series of ten birdhouses based on the shacks in a Black township on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, as well as other African villages. The series of old doors grew out of that.

I have always been drawn to things that show signs of age, a past life, forgotten and abandoned, long past usefulness. Never was the beauty and potential purpose of using such items made clearer to me than when I saw the shacks lived in by thousands of people in Soweto, the Black township that covers 70 square miles on the outskirts of Johannesburg, two decades ago.

The shacks were colorful, functional, and the source of stubborn pride to the people who had built them. Often painted in bright colors, they were decorated in simple, yet crude and beautiful, ways. It was this beauty in decay and squalor that drew me to making the birdhouses I now have in my collection.

The question I asked myself before I began was in what form could I take discarded, rusty, and disintegrating materials and re-purpose those into something that would not only give them new life, but be used by living creatures as dwellings? Birdhouses. Birdhouses would not only provide shelter, but be kept outside so that the never-ending aging process of nature would be allowed to continue. The birdhouses I built as a result have been almost instantly inhabited by wrens and house sparrows, who have given new life and purpose to materials that many people considered to have outlived their usefulness and been abandoned and forgotten.

In looking at these ten houses, I hope they evoke a sense of time and place, abandonment, persistence, and a simple life. Each one reflects the personality of the owners in Soweto and other African villages, and the innocent charm and simple beauty drawn from ordinary, often discarded materials.

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These are not meant to be displayed on a bookcase, but should remain outside, where they will provide a home for birds and let weather and nature continue the aging and slow decomposition, becoming even more beautiful as time goes on.