Charlotte Evans: I Sing for the Birds That Sang for Us @ Marrow Gallery

When we first moved to New York from London we lived on the top floor of an old warehouse. There was an AC unit punched through one of the windows that did little more than keep us awake rattling in the summer and let in great drafts in the winter. But it was also the perfect perch for a collection of starlings whose claws tap danced us awake every morning at dawn. Annoying but I welcomed their song as it reminded me of home. Now, in Toronto, our morning chorus is a large family of sparrows who live in a clutch of trees in the next-door garden. ‘Cockney Sparrows’, fellow Londoners.

Neither Sparrows nor Starlings are native to North America. During the 19th Century, ‘nostalgic’ European Settlers, Colonizers, set up Acclimatisation Societies, groups dedicated to introducing plant and animal species to different regions of the world. Aside from believing the native flora and fauna to be inferior, they wanted reminders of home in familiar bird song and flowers. The Acclimatisation Societies were just part of a systematic movement by Europeans to wipe out native cultures and customs across the globe. Colonialisation is still not taught in schools in the UK yet politically and ecologically the fallout from Imperialism is still very much being felt in all corners of the world.

Though I hate what they represent, those 19th Century ‘enthusiasts’ helped me in my acclimatisation by bathing me in familiar birdsong. There is a Welsh word, ‘hiraeth’ for which I feel a great affinity. It means a nostalgic longing for home. I have thought a lot of this as I have made this work, the impulse to seek out and surround yourself with the familiar in a foreign land. I have done it, filling my garden with familiar plants, cherishing the bowl inherited from my grandmother and opening the window to hear the sparrows. And over time, the ‘new’ has become the familiar too, and I now refer to not one, but two places as home. Migration has always existed, in people, birds..... My migration was by choice, I return to London seasonally. But what of the people who have been forced from their lands, from their homes by conflicts rooted in Colonialism? How will they acclimatise to a foreign land, should they find somewhere to settle, without the familiar birdsong and flowers of home?