Eccentric native birds are “a window to our own wild ways” says the renowned Australian artist.
The humans are distracted.
Leila Jeffreys observes it every time she walks down the street – ever-present stress on our faces and a distance in our eyes.
“We are in our heads. We’re using
It’s why she photographs birds.
Leila is an Australian-based artist who presents the avian world at human scale. She wants her work to remind viewers that they too are animals.
“When you look at a bird, and you look into their eyes, you notice they operate on all the senses. They have an intelligence, they can think, but they are deeply, deeply present. They are deeply looking.
“You walk into an exhibition and see these images at human scale and you’re looking eye-to-eye ... all of a sudden, you’re looking at an equal; something that is communicating back to you, something you have lost in yourself. It’s like a window to our own wild ways.”
And nowhere has birdlife wilder than Aotearoa New Zealand.
“I’m bloody excited to be coming over for this,” says Leila, before the Aotearoa Art Fair, where she is showing with Sydney’s Olsen Gallery.
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The photographic and video artist has exhibited all over the world. Leila’s work is held by the likes of Parliament House Canberra, the Hermès Collections of Contemporary Photographs and the Museum of Photography in South Korea. In 2023, she featured in The Best in Show at Fotografiska in New York, and the landmark exhibition Civilisation: The Way We Live Now, at London’s Saatchi Gallery.
But this week marks her first exhibition in New Zealand.
Leila’s new series The Memory of the World features large-scale images of kererū, kākā, kiwi, kororā, kea – and one very special kākāpō.
“It was like photographing royalty,” Leila says of her time with Sirocco, the large and extremely rare parrot whose international claims to fame include an intimate moment with the head of a zoologist filming a television show with British comedian Stephen Fry.
“There was so much at stake,” says Leila. “Because if Sirocco didn’t want to be photographed, Sirocco is not photographed.”
Much planning had been required to figure out the logistics of working with the normally Codfish Island-based kākāpō while he was “on tour” at Wellington’s Zealandia. A thoroughly sterilised Leila and her assistant had set up lights and a large, paper roll backdrop behind a tree stump in the bird’s “breakfast room” – and then they waited.
“I’m standing there quietly. The door opens and he walks in, looks at me, looks at all the equipment. He’s like ‘I’m not having a piece of this’ and walks straight back out. My heart sank.”
And then, she says, she relaxed. “It was that moment of going ‘I have no control over this situation’.” The tension in the room disappeared; ultimately, Sirocco reappeared.
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Advertise with NZME.It was a quiet and calm shoot. Just the slow “da-dunk” of a medium format studio camera trying to capture form, beauty and personality.
By contrast: “The kākā just looks at your paper roll and starts tearing it into shreds. The kea comes in and they put their head on the side so low to the ground, they’re looking at any tiny crack, trying to figure things out ... it’s like watching a mad scientist trying to solve something.
“You probably know how kererū get drunk on fermented berries? So funny. That’s why this one was in care. Once it sobered up, I took its portrait and then walked up the hill to release it ... ”
The title of her Aotearoa series recognises the uniqueness of birds that have evolved in island isolation.
“These birds in New Zealand are like living records of ancient lineages, and that to me is incredible – that they carry this evolutionary memory in their bodies and their behaviours and their songs.
“This has vanished in so many places around the world and you guys have this memory that’s still kept alive in the forest.”
Leila considers herself an artist-activist. The media section of her website reveals appearances in Vogue Living, Elle Decoration and Harper’s Bazaar et al and, yes, she says, there are almost certainly people who will buy her work because it matches their couch.
“But I really hope that their little soul is captured. It might be subtle, it might be gentle, but it’s a little whisper that is just trying to remind people this other world is out there that is so beautiful and so good for us and is kind of the answer to the madness that we are experiencing on the planet at the moment.”
The contemporary art movement is a broad church. Artists push boundaries; dealer galleries can be confusing (and sometimes confronting) spaces.
“It is a different world,” says Leila. “In the fine art world, I think I’m a little bit of an anomaly.”
Her Sydney gallery attracts high-end art collectors and big name artists - but it’s her shows that draw record crowds.
“It’s because I also draw in an audience of people that don’t buy art, but are absolute nature lovers.”
It can take Jeffreys up to 10 years to pull a single series together, working with conservation, environmental and animal welfare organisations to access the birds she studies then photographs.
Some of her earliest portraits were of budgerigars (a series called High Society was reproduced on a set of stamps from Australia Post) but more recently, she’s moved into the conceptual. Her response to Australia’s devastating 2019 wildfires, The wound is the place where the light enters, features birds with natural red markings.
“They appear to bleed,” she told Photo London, which devoted an entire issue to the series. “Yet at the same time, they embrace their wounds with a spirit of openness and beauty.”
Her childhood was an outdoor adventure. Born in Papua New Guinea (her mother is from India; her father from the Isle of Man), she once lived on a houseboat in Kashmir. She studied photography in Perth and Sydney but a plan to focus on people portraiture stalled; the pressure of capturing an image the client liked was too much.
Backyard bird watching and an ornithological trip to Christmas Island was the “light bulb moment”. Birds are a “constant reminder” of how we are meant to be.
“This distraction has taken over the human species. We are suffering from an epidemic of overthinking and it’s actually not our natural state. We’ve disconnected so much from nature that we’re forgetting to sense. To smell, to feel, to touch. But there is also the intuitive sense I’ve witnessed in animals.
“People say they feel things in their gut? This intuitiveness naturally exists in us! But we don’t often tap into it ... I’m trying to remember that part of us that is always there, always will be.”
Leila Jeffreys shows The Memory of the World with Sydney’s Olsen Gallery at the Aotearoa Art Fair, May 1-4, Viaduct Events Centre, Auckland and presents an artist’s talk on Saturday, May 3, at 2pm.
