$205.00
1 in stock (can be backordered)
Certificate of Authenticity Included
Every original artwork ships with a signed Certificate of Authenticity confirming title, medium, dimensions, and artist provenance. Created with archival-quality pigment ink on acid-free paper.
A Sulphur-crested Cockatoo spreads its wings beside kookaburras and ibis, ink and collage in a misty hoop pine.
A Sulphur-crested Cockatoo throws its wings wide against a sky the colour of old paper, claiming the foreground of this ink and photo-collage artwork. Behind it, a Kookaburra watches from a lower branch, and an Australian White Ibis picks its way along the same silhouetted hoop pine, one bird among a whole flock of locals settling in for the evening. The mist sits low and soft, turning the tree into little more than a dark outline against sepia light, the kind of hush that falls over the Australian bush just before the light goes.
The artwork began as fine ink drawings on paper, each bird built up in patient lines, feather by feather, until the linework carried its own texture and weight. These drawings were then digitally collaged with Australian photography, so the crisp detail of ink meets the soft depth of a real bush landscape, and the result sits somewhere between drawing and photograph. In print, the ink keeps its crispness, small details like the barb of a single feather or the fine cross hatching in the cockatoo’s crest stay visible up close, while the collage recedes into a soft, textured backdrop when viewed from across a room.
The Locals is a portrait of belonging as much as it is a portrait of birds. Cockatoo, Kookaburra and Ibis rarely share a single frame so easily, yet here they gather in the one tree, each recognisably itself and slightly larger than life, almost personified in the way it holds its perch. The hoop pine anchors them, a native so common along the eastern seaboard that it becomes shorthand for home. It is a scene most Australians have half-seen at dusk, a gathering of the birds that share the yard, the park, the roadside, rendered here with enough care that the familiar starts to feel worth a second look.
This piece is part of a limited edition of only 50 prints, each one produced to hold the fine detail of the original ink work and the tonal depth of the collage. Every print in the run is numbered, so no more than fifty homes will carry this particular flock.
The Locals – Australian birds
