Melissa Borman

I am a Minneapolis-based photographer and installation artist. My work addresses the interconnected relationship embedded in using landscape elements as metaphors to depict our human stories and how these depictions shape our ideas of our surroundings. I am particularly interested in how the methods we use to share stories, from fairy tales to social media, impact our collective understanding of the natural world.

In the winter of 2020, as I was preparing for a spring show (that was eventually canceled), I made a photograph of a little ceramic bird in my studio. I had picked up the figurine at a thrift store with the intention of breaking it to use the pieces in an installation. I thought preserving the figurine’s elegant form in a photograph would make the act of destruction easier. I was wrong.

The enlarged image made a poorly re-glued flower petal more visible and the little bird even more endearing. I couldn’t bring myself to break it. Instead, I added more well-worn ceramic birds to my collection and spent the grey days of January photographing them.

Little did I know that the solitude of winter would last throughout 2020 and beyond. That May, my mother passed away the same week George Floyd was murdered just a few miles from my home. I inherited my mother’s collection of bird figurines and the project evolved. Selecting backdrops and arranging the figurines became a meditation on individual as well as collective grief.

Showing chipped beaks, a missing eye, or a broken tail, Birds is about the fragile things we love and treasure. We make space for them, we care for them, and yet more often than not someone will find them neglected or damaged despite our good intentions. The work asserts that they, like so many imperfect and once abandoned things, are worthy of care and attention.