Designing a Luxurious Birdhouse, Designed by Birds
In my last post I left out a category of animal design: design made by animals. I picked up “Animal Architecture” by Ingo Arndt which showcases all the kinds of things (mostly homes) made by animals, like sea creatures, rodents, and insects. The best builders of all are birds, some species of which are better than others. My (and everyone else's) favorite is the bower bird’s works (images taken from the book):
On the left is a view of the whole nest, on the right is a collage of the things they like to collect. In my work, I’m concerned about if an animal will like my design not only functionally, but also aesthetically. So naturally this makes me wonder, do all birds like the things the bower bird has collected? Do they like organizing things like this? Is it the colors, the shape, smells? Would other bird species collect them too if they had the time?
The project I’ve been wanting to do for a while is a birdhouse. When a person envisions a ‘luxurious’ birdhouse, they might see a large birdhouse shaped like a mansion with bird-related trinkets in it. Though those kinds of houses are fun and it’s novel to see birds interacting with them, they’re more for our entertainment rather than the birds’.
So my hope for this is to create a house that, in theory, would be luxurious from the viewpoint of a bird. To start, I wanted to pick out a bird I like that likes to nest in human-made objects so that I could adjust the design for a specific species. Blue tits seem to be common in London (spotted one in Burgess park a few days ago) and they’re cute. According to this site they need a 25mm sized hole, so I keep that in mind while designing it, and are willing to nest where ever possible, so I don’t have to worry about placing it in a certain spot (like in vegetation).
Australian weaver ants take leaves and practically sew them together using silk. In doing so, they make nest-like structures, unfit for a bird, but when applied to this project can fix a lot of structural and design issues.
I plan to separate pieces of the birdhouse and reattach them with very strong string, and sew ‘bird'-collectible items’ onto the house all over the house using the seams.
There’s a lot of issues I’ve thought of, imagining the process of this birdhouse—I’ve answered some of them and left the rest for later.
Ceramic is fragile, relative to wood. Fire to cone 10 (higher temp, higher strength.)
If I fire to cone 10, surface glaze will drip into holes and make it impossible to string together pieces of the house. Make larger holes; any glaze drips shouldn’t cover holes entirely and be able to drill fillings, or wax resist along the seam, so there’s no glaze—use thicker string so it covers the bare clay.
How should I create molds for the tiny things? Probably sprig molds. Collect all the items at once, and make a flat mold (halving each item in half, if possible). What about snail shells?—I can’t cut those in half. Make a small mold like regular, just don’t make the second half.
Should all the tiny things be make of the same material—should I try carving (wood, rock)? Well… the current project requires that these two(+) projects we’re making be two different materials. Well, I can argue my focus is ceramics, but I’m incorporating mixed media in it (yarn/string), so it’s not like I’m secluding myself from different mediums, and the process of making this one objects involves many different processes. So, yes, I think I should use different materials as often as possible.
What should the different materials be? I’ve tried out whittling (from previous project) but it’s a very slow process. I’m very interested in jade/crystal carving, but that’s also probably very slow, as well as expensive (for tools—maybe workshops have something.) Likely will use wood because easy to turn into beads & can work on it at home.
Will any of the decorations be made of ceramic? Yes, but I’m not sure which ones, because it creates a two-fold problem.
Glazing very small pieces (1cm) is almost impossible, especially if you want them to be beads. Yes, this makes me sad. But I could just paint them in underglaze or colored slip—the goal isn’t really realism, but repetition/imitation of birds’ collected objects. At the same time, I imagine these items as glossy & pretty, so I don’t like how plain they’d turn out.
Bigger pieces (1-3”) will make the birdhouse as a whole too heavy once everything is placed onto it, and since they’re attached to the house with string it increases changes of breakage. I guess I’ll have to use strong string. I’m still not sure what would be best—Google says nylon. But also, if I hollow out objects enough, it shouldn’t be a problem, but it takes a lot of skill to make very thin objects by hollowing them out from a mold, and it also makes them more fragile (but them breaking is less important than the whole thing falling apart).
How will it be possible to open the house for cleaning? It won’t be as simple as popping open a lid/latch on a wooden house, but it will be possible. There will be multiple variations (including houses w/o string), but the sections of the house will be sewn together, and one section should be easy enough to untie, but sewn well enough it won’t fall apart as a bird nests inside. So, the untie-able section should not have any decoration on it. There is a risk when this house is put to test, it will fall apart. So to prevent horrible damage to a bird/eggs, the removable section needs to not be on the bottom (nest falls out) or on the top (whole house falls). It needs to be hollowed out on the side, which changes my original plan for the sections’ design ( basically, cut diagonally up & down, following the shape of the house—now it will be more abstract, but I will try to hide this.)
Process plan. This is a project that requires me to… manage my time. This is will be much easier to do if I write down each step I’ll have to do, and when I might do it.
Make model of mold on Blender. This was actually the first thing I did already. I had a pretty, spiral peanut (turned pear) shape in mind before I researched how tits’ nests look like. Really, I had no 3D modelling experience until now and I wanted to create a simple form I liked. “Animal Architecture” has images of tit nests, and they have a similar shape as what I ended up modelling anyway.
(also—isn’t the top photo interesting? It seems this bird likes symmetry, two sets of leaves of each side, and it’s the sort of bird (tit) I’m trying to attract.)
3D print model. Currently in production, Oct. 25.
Make plaster mold from printed model.
5 DAY TIME LOSS ON MAIN PROJECT because I can’t pour the mold until the plaster is cured… so during the meantime I should:
Mix (cone 10, cone 6) glazes — according to this, birds want a camouflaged house for protection, but seem to not mind bright colors if positioned in a colorful garden. Using a mold I can make many variations, so I could make a very colorful one, a hidden one, and a mixed one, etc. Since the garden I have access to is mostly green with a few flowers, maybe it should be green, but it may be hanging against a brick wall, so it might be brick red. I hate both these colors and I wanted to do deep blue initially… I’ll aim to make two: one to blend in with my garden’s environment, and one I think is pretty itself.
Make many, many, many test pieces. I need to make pieces that test how these glazes flow into holes (for sewing) as well as see how the color turns out. Bisque fire them.
Collect and turn tiny items into re-makeables. I want the process of collecting these things similar to how a bird might collect them, keeping in mind shapes they might like as well as what I like (snail shells, those round red things on the ground, glass bottle caps, blue berries, raspberries, etc.) Need to figure out how I’ll make each of these objects.
Once the 5 day loss is over:
Pour birdhouses. Ideally 3 or 4—one as a replacement, one as a variation.
Clean molds + section them off. I wanted to make segments in form with the spiral shape, but I think I need to make more than one version of this depending on how confident I am the string will hold it all together.
Make smallish holes along the edges of the segments.
Bisque fire.
Glaze, place them on stilts glaze-up—don’t glaze the inside (will help water absorption I think—I think bird would like natural interior. Add more grit to slip for a rocky feel? I should buy a rocky clay/slip for a very natural looking birdhouse.) Fire again, cone 10.
At this point it gets fuzzy—a mix of crocheting and sewing the sections together, likely needing to find solutions as I go, as I’ve never tried doing this before. Basically, I want to just sew together the house very firmly, and drape/sew-in the decorations along the sides and bottom, a bit like a windchime.
I think I might have seen artists who “mend” ceramics using textiles or metal in unpractical ways, like what I’m planning to do, literally sewing together or soldering a plate back together. What I’m doing is more practical—it has a purpose to open it, add decoration to it, and make it more breathable and comfortable for a bird (maybe birds don’t care about comfort, though—that’s what it builds the nest for. Maybe a soft birdhouse would lead birds to create nests with less effort, and a harder house would make them make more comfortable ones? It would be very hard to study this on a course like mine…)
I picked up a book about mixed media ceramics, but it let me down a bit, because I feel like I’ve seen it all before. There was an interesting part about sculpting with ‘gold/silver’ clay which melts into silver in the kiln—but what I’m interested in, textiles, was just things like handles, knobs, using ceramics for buttons, texture in sculptures… but they’re not really functional within the piece itself, if that makes sense. This is something I’m exploring in this project, and I think I’ll follow up on it later.
