Psittacus, Popinjay, Parakeet, Pest weaves together 16 portraits of medieval parakeets. Each panel is embroidered with a parrot drawn from Western European manuscripts and bestiaries dating from the 12th to 14th centuries. Bestiaries compiled real and imaginary creatures, equating different “beasts” to prescriptive moral lessons. Manuscript marginalia depicted weird and wonderful creatures at the edges of the page, equating distance with otherness, the page’s space reflecting physical space in a Euro-centric world. This work moves the birds from the margins and the confines of fables and celebrates them in their own right, illuminating their portraits on translucent tiles.  

Each bird is embroidered onto an organza palimpsest - layers of “waste” material discarded from previous projects stitched together into a palimpsest of iridescent fabrics. Each panel is then woven together through archival cotton tape - a material typically reserved for use in conservation of the folios and manuscripts from which parakeet imagery has been sourced.

Just as in the bestiary, Parakeets continue to evoke strong emotions.They are described as pests, as an invasion, slipping from the ecological, to the moral, to the racial. And yet parakeets have been part of Europe for nearly a millennia, resting in the pages of archival folios. Native to the Indian subcontinent, parakeets in Central Europe date back as far as Alexander the Great.

This series of embroidered portraits taps into the murmurations of contradictory feelings that parakeets effuse in people. The parakeet has been enduringly fascinating, always taking it up space and disrupting its environs. In doing so, it forces us to asks: who belongs? What is natural? This work joins the enduring dance between parrot and human, a constant negotiation between two interlinked species.

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