Nesting

Every summer for four years I’ve built nests from found materials. I thought the work was about safety and hiding, but many nests look like traps. The same place can keep you safe and wear you down, and it can take years to notice which one it’s doing.

Every summer for the past four years I’ve been building nests. I use whatever is lying around, and sometimes I make up a small healing rite to go with them. When I started I thought the work was about safe space, about hiding. Then I looked through the series and a lot of the nests looked more like traps. Do nest make you homesick, even for a home you never had? Maybe.

Wasps live in nests too, and so do vipers. In Poland people used to say that if you knocked down a swallow’s nest your cows would give bloody milk, so you left it alone. I don’t think nests are bad, at least not all of them. The same place can keep you safe and wear you down, and it can take years to notice which one it’s doing. The house where someone has dinner waiting is sometimes the house you can’t wait to leave. I can’t pull those apart, so in the photographs I don’t.

Byung-Chul Han writes about “nests of time”, the rituals where time stops rushing and lets you stay put for a while. That’s close to what I’d call home. You can build that together with other person. Phoenix alone builds a nest of cinnamon and myrrh, dies in it and comes back out.

The Karelian houses where I started this work are nests as well, just not mine. Though, here’s some freedom in that. When everything is settled and planned, you get to disrupt and look for a tiny fracture.

And there’s the glory of a Finnish summer over all of it. Tailorbirds stitch leaves together with their beaks to make a nest. Kauas pilvet karkaavat, the clouds go far away. First you lose something. Maybe later you gain it back.

Editor: Kasia Ślesińska