Summary

The essence of "The Pearl of Tailorbird" lies in the fortuitous poetry generated through the process of multiple translations – avian to human, phonetic to semantic, textual to visual – in which the latent porosity of language helps give birth to multi-layered resonances. For Hayama, this kind of whimsical linguistic deconstruction underscores the central role of language in the process of anthropocentric world-building – and offers a method for transforming hegemonic modes of knowing into ones perhaps more sensitively attuned to our own origins in the natural world. Coaxing a depth of associative meaning from the rhythmic interplay of sound, text, and imagery, The Pearl of Tailorbird perhaps most resembles lyric poetry – or a hermeneutic puzzle – given spatial form. (www.emptygallery.com)