community nests

Nest at Woodland School, Woodland School, Weston, MA, 4’x13’x13′, 2010
Nest at River Run, Winthrop School, Hamilton, MA, 4’x13’x13′, 2006
J-Birds Nest, 4’x6’x6′, Gloucester, MA, 4’x6’x6′, 2007

As a collector of abandoned birds nests, nests naturally became a recurring form in my work and began when I was pregnant with my first son. At the time, I was drawn to ephemeral materials when building sculptures and loved the process of gathering those materials and readying them for building. The nest is an exquisite form being both intricate and obsessive and is universally understood as a safe haven or home. These larger sculptural nests came about as my son was getting ready to leave the nest for high school. Two of the three nests were human scale and functioned as outdoor classrooms for elementary school aged children as part of their ecological science curriculums. In these projects I led the community in building the nests with gathered branching and provided education on making sculpture, natural materials, and ecology.