Silverpoint

​Specimens

Suzanne Proulx

My Bird Series is an ongoing project that documents and memorializes dead birds that I find in my daily life. These Birds are done in silverpoint, an antique drawing medium where a piece of silver is used on a prepared ground to make precise marks that cannot be erased, and allows me to capture all the subtle minutiae of the birds.  

 Birds have always been mysterious creatures to me, and as a child I was fascinated when coming across a dead bird, both taking the rare opportunity to observe the details up close, but being afraid to touch it after warnings from my mother about germs. 

 Some of the birds died natural deaths; others were victims of urban sprawl, flying into windows or being mauled by housecats.  I am more interested in ones that are fully, beautifully intact rather than ones aggressively mailed mauled or in a state of decay. Some models are specimens borrowed from Edinboro University’s Science Museum.