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The Red List
Jayne Ivimey • May 14, 2021
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Sheringham Artist Jayne Ivimay returned to Norfolk after spending several years working on a wetland restoration project in New Zealand. What she found when she came home was a shocking reduction in Britain's birdlife.
Over the next few years, Jayne dedicated her creative energy towards telling the story of The Red List, the RSPB's register of endangered British birds. Jayne did this by sculpting life-size birds in clay, hung on their back, and fired only once.
Without showing any sign of cause of death, the collection brings a haunting dignity to their demise and encourages us to re-evaluate what their absence means.
I had been living in NZ for seven years working on a wetland restoration programme to encourage the return of the New Zealand Dotterel, and on my return to the UK in 2012 I was dismayed to find 16 new birds had been added to the RSPB’s list of endangered British birds bringing the number to 52. These were all birds I was familiar with.
I decided as an artist that I must do something to bear witness to the implications of the Red List, which identifies the growing numbers in danger of extinction, and went to The Natural History Museum in Tring to look at them in their preserved state.
It was shocking to walk the corridors of drawers full of dead birds, around half a million in total that were collected at the turn of the last century by enthusiasts and those interested in evolution and nature.
Having had this opportunity to see so many, I realised how difficult it is to imagine what those 52 Red List birds really looked like, and to experience the shock of it. Only by seeing it can we really take in the immensity of the numbers, and to understand what is happening in our country. By 2016 that number had grown to 70, though restoration programmes have enabled the Bittern, Nightjar and Dunlin to move to the less precarious amber list, leaving 67 on the Red List.
Drawing the birds in the ‘skin’ position reminded me of the effigies of Kings, Queens and Nobles carved in marble, immortalised long after their deeds have been forgotten, lying on their backs with hands crossed over their breasts in a state of perpetual prayer.
Working the life size birds in clay, on their backs and fired only once without glaze or colour, without the patina of feathers and without any sign of the cause of death so that they are seemingly sleeping in some mysterious eternity, brought a dignity to their presence similar to the grand nobles.
I wonder how their absence is affecting us? Are we less aware of the depth of the sky and songs that are not our own ? Do we stop and search the sky when a cloud of birds passes over?
The smallest strip or corner of untamed land, a mess of bushes, an unsprayed lawn is all they need to survive. Just leaving things alone and remembering we are one of many species, powerful indeed, but no more important than everything else that breathes and has life.
This installation will be on show from July 5th until October at the Zoological museum in the David Attenborough Centre, Cambridge.
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