By Callum Ludwig
A Warburton artist has taken note of Craft Victoria’s October-long Craft Contemporary and National Bird Week with an exhibition of her nest sculptures at the City Library in Melbourne.
Lori Kravos, who creates her work under the pseudonym Zora Verona in honour of her grandmothers, will have her The Art and Craft of Nests exhibition on show for the whole month, featuring 27 nest sculptures inspired by natural history collections held around the world.
Ms Kravos said the environment of Warburton is a huge catalyst for her work.
“I’ve got 35 bird species that live in my immediate area, just on my block alone and I’ve been lucky enough to observe some of the nests they’ve created. But I am so inspired by the flora as well, it’s amazing how I can forage materials that are similar or they have shares the same properties as materials birds use around the world,” she said.
“I’ve lived up in the Valley now for 16 years on Mount Little Joe, lived through the bushfires in 2009 and saw the sky turn orange in 2020 and wanted to create something to try and reconcile the damage. I thought the nest sculptures would be a way to honour the birds and billions of animals who died in the fires, as well as tell the stories of our bird life, which is disappearing all over the world.”
National Bird Week 2022 will be held from 17 to 23 October with the goal of inspiring Australians to take action and get involved in bird conservation efforts.
Ms Kravos said the nest sculptures are exploring human art and craft traditions and how they might have intersected between birds and humans throughout history.
“We weave, felt and stitch and birds are our oldest living relative to dinosaurs so it stands to reason that they were weaving, felting and stitching long before we were and perhaps we might have learned it from them,” she said.
“The Olduvai Gorge [in Tanzania] has some of the oldest humans remains found there with weaver birds found at the same level of an archaeological dig, and so it’s likely these weaver birds built baskets which fell out of trees and inspired the species before Homo sapiens, Homo habilis with crafting techniques.”
Birdlife Australia also hosts an Aussie Bird Count event during National Bird Week, where people are encouraged to head anywhere outside and record any birds they encounter for 20 minutes in their Aussie Bird Count app or website, which also has useful information for identifying any unfamiliar species.
Ms Kravos said she is really excited by the opportunity to show off her works.
“It’s such a strong artist community up in the Yarra Valley and a number of the local artists have inspired my own journey. We often get opportunities to exhibit locally, but not further afield so hopefully it’s inspiring for them to see as well,” she said.
“The whole reason I create is so that people can be inspired by how incredible our natural world and wildlife are and I know that if people learn something about how incredible these animals are, they’ll be inspired to protect them. When I had my exhibition locally, that was the thing that came out of it, most people said that ‘I’ll never look at a bird in the same way again, I’ll never dismiss them as just a bird.’”
