Four ‘birds’ in four handmade bird boxes, which hang from the walls of a polythene chamber, give a ‘performance’ of Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 33, No. 3, ‘The Bird’. The work continues a series of bird box installations that investigate issues in musical aesthetics.
Historically, classical composers have been keen to imitate the natural world in their musical works. The sound of a violin, for instance, has been used to imitate the sound of a bird. In Bird Chamber, the situation is reversed: ‘birds’ imitate the musical work of an eighteenth-century composer.
Bird Chamber was exhibited for the duration of the inaugural Greenwich International String Quartet Festival within the eighteenth-century architecture of King Charles Court at the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, 2009.