Nest-works:
models for knowledge and cohabitation
with more-than human kin
Instructions for a nest-work:Take as an example the nest of a bird.
Create a forum in this structure.
Build this common space from what is disparate and varied.
Consider safety and softness in making.
Construct a place for things coming into being.Instructions for making:Notice the river flowing around you.
See how this river makes your world.
Examine your ways of making.
Give up your only-human territory.
See what places you wish to re-wild.
Put nest-works in them.
Richmond Art Gallery: Nest-work installation
In 2023, for the exhibition, MOTHLIKE/silvery-blue, I installed a “Nest-work” as a place for communal action and knowledge. Throughout the exhibition, the Nest-work housed gatherings, performances and storytelling activities on birds and the river estuary. It included bird-friendly window treatments, artworks, and live footage of a barn owl nest box from Richmond Park’s Nest Box Program.
Sound design: Omar Zubair
Vocals: Brigid Coult, Huestis, Omar Zubair
Nest design and construction: Huestis and Murasaki Lau
Nest materials: Collected by students at Henry Anderson Elementary School in a bubble wrap drive, led by educator Anne-Marie Fenn
Time-delayed projection of current nesting of Barn Owls in Richmond, BC: Provided by Richmond Parks Nest Box Program.
Co-making this world
College Art Association 2021, Chair of Panel Session
Nest-works began with an experimental panel for the 2021 College Art Association Conference, called ‘Co-Making this World’. The experimental session was modelled after the nest of a bird, a Black-Capped Chickadee. As this cavity-nester builds a home of disparate materials, the panel of artist-researchers built a session of disparate theories and practices, as we considered relationships with world-systems that are in the process of making (such as the nest of the chickadee).
Nest-works: Technoetic Arts
2022
For Technoetic Arts, this nest-work is an entanglement of short essays made by artists working with a common pattern, framing eco-poetics on collaborative and participatory processes with the non-human/more-than-humanI curated. We wove a nest of research material, as we consider new models for knowledge and creative production.
Nest-works: Art/Science
Richmond Art Gallery
2023
Artists and scientists, and Indigenous Peoples present on the fascinating topic of nest habitat and nest-making on the Pacific Flyway and here in the Fraser River Estuary Key Biodiversity Area—a key “stopover site” for migratory birds—go to nest.
David Bradley, director of Birds Canada in BC, as he looks at local River Gates, Audubon Alaska, Pacific Shorebird Conservation Initiative Coordinator
Artists Isabelle Groc, Christopher Pavsek, Amy-Claire Huestis
Jim Hornbrook of Hwlitsum First Nation
