The birds in Summertime come from distant worlds. Their ancestors once lived in Australia and New Zealand—until, in the mid-19th century, European colonialists began shipping them to Europe by the hundreds of thousands. Since the 1860s, generations of these wild-caught birds have lived behind bars and within cages, never knowing the environments they were born for.

They have been denied their natural habitat, their instincts held in suspension. The scent of wild plants, the texture of leaves, the vividness of native blossoms—none of it has been part of their lives.

In Summertime, I try to return a fragment of that lost world. Each summer, I bring flowers from my garden into their aviary. For some, it may be their very first encounter with a flower: its smell, its color, its taste. These quiet moments become encounters between captivity and memory, between what was and what might have been.
It is, for me, a gentle act of restitution.