The Andrew & Laura McCain Gallery welcomes Thaddeus Holownia back to exhibit a body of work inspired by birds. Timed to open on the weekend of pARTicipate Arts & Nature Festival, the works in the exhibition bring together not only science and the arts, but feature a long time creative collaboration by the photographer with his friend and fellow artist, Nova Scotia poet, Harry Thurston.
Opening, artists’ talk and book launch
Thursday, September 5, 2024, 5:30-7:30 pm
Everyone is welcome, admission is free.
The artists will give an informal talk about their collaboration,
their art and the third collaborator, Gay Hansen.
BLUE JAY
Cyanocitta cristata
Unseen in summer, woods-deep,
come fall, you return,
casting voices, your own
and others you mimic.
Not blue at all,
your feathers
bequeath only blue
light to the eye.
Clever corvid,
you may change a life!
— with a beat of your wing,
a call we must heed.
Book Launch
of a feather is the third book in a trilogy that includes Ova Aves and Icarus, Falling of Birds. Conceived as a tribute to the teacher, naturalist, and ornithologist Gay Hansen — Holownia’s late partner and Thurston’s long-time friend, the collection combines Thaddeus Holownia’s photography of bird feathers with the poetry of Harry Thurston.
Heart of the Bird
These photographs are of study mounts prepared by Gay Hansen—teacher, naturalist and ornithologist, and the late partner and muse of Thaddeus Holownia.
A graduate of Acadia, Gay was a lecturer and lab instructor in biology at Mount Allison University, in Sackville, New Brunswick, for 39 years (1979–2018). During this time, she conducted labs in multiple fields. Her great passion, however, was Ornithology.
“I think that it is essential to educate people about birds—they are extremely important in ecological, environmental, cultural and recreational realms,” she once said. “Ornithology is one of the few fields of Biology where citizen science makes significant contributions.”
Gay was also a talented craftsperson, notably as a weaver, and she combined her scientific expertise and her artistic skills in taxidermy, to create a collection of study mounts.
There is an assumption in our time that there is an unbridgeable gap between the Arts and the Sciences.
In fact, there is compatibility, even interdependence, between these two spheres of human endeavour. As Harvard biologist, Edward O. Wilson, observes in Consilience, The Unity of Knowledge: “Neither science nor the arts can be complete without combining their separate strengths. Science needs the intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the fresh blood of the sciences.”
These photographs would not have been created without Gay’s skills as an ornithologist and taxidermist deployed originally for the purpose of passing on her knowledge and love of birds to her students, and generations of students to follow.
The feather—described as “a remarkably refined and complex apparatus … that, among other uses, enabled highly sophisticated flight”—besides its functionality is unarguably beautiful. That is what one feels when first looking at these photographs, ‘How beautiful they are!’
It seems no accident that Holownia’s photographs are of breast feathers—of the heart of the bird.