On a bright blustery Saturday in June 2024, I followed the coastal path above the sands and mudflats of Half Moon Bay in Heysham to attend a drop-in nest building workshop led by artist Henna Asikainen. The event was the first in a series of workshops commissioned by Lancaster Arts as part of their joint project LANDING with We Live Here, an ambitious social arts programme realised by independent arts producer Tim Harrison. The Kent-based organisation works with local, national and international artists to produce projects aimed at encouraging deeper connections between communities and the natural environment. Lancaster Arts delivers an innovative, interdisciplinary artistic programme within local communities and across their spaces at Lancaster University, the Nuffield Theatre, the Great Hall and the Peter Scott Gallery.
Nestled on a hillside known locally as the Barrows, the chosen site (on National Trust land with their support) offered a bird’s eye view of Morecambe Bay with the wide expanse of land and sea butting up to Heysham Power Station in the distance. People out walking with children and dogs were curious to learn why there was a human-sized nest materialising on the grassland. Some stopped to talk or help to weave locally gathered wild flowers and leaves throughout a framework of foraged branches. Those of us notified of the workshop in advance were prompted by Asikainen and a quote from William Blake, ‘The bird a nest, the spider a web, (hu)man friendship’, to bring talismans, cloth fragments or other natural materials to include within the fabric of the structure. As we intertwined the nest with offerings, buttercups, elderflower, bracken and mugwort, the artist, Tim Harrison and Lancaster Arts facilitators encouraged us to share our experiences of home and think about what might generate a sense of belonging or connection to place. Was it community, family and friends, familiarity, experience or something other, less tangible? During the day, many more hands – Lancaster Arts estimates around 150 people – contributed to the nest until it became shrine-like. An altar for worshipping earth, expressing notions of ritual and a deeper connection to other, more-than-human, species.
The workshop at Heysham was the first of five nest iterations that have taken place in various locations. Since then, the second nest was communally crafted on the beach in Morecambe as part of Lancaster Art’s LANDING Festival, concluding the day’s events by acting as host and shelter to a group of community singers performing within its driftwood boughs. The third nest event evolved out of a workshop exploring themes of home and belonging and was assembled on Burton Bushes Nature Reserve in Hull as part of the city’s Freedom Festival.
The fourth nest was constructed and exhibited along with further elements at Lancaster Arts’ Peter Scott Gallery based at Lancaster University. The show’s title, Lintukoto/Haven, translates from Finnish approximately as ‘bird-home’ and relates to a mythical, faraway place where birds migrate to during the harsh winters and represents Asikainen’s ongoing body of work of the same name. Lintukoto/Haven brings together four distinct works exploring intersecting issues relating to environmental destruction, migration, belonging and grief, interconnected by the poetic texts of writer and poet Alycia Pirmohamed.
Situated within the gallery space, ‘Nest’ (2025) consisted of jutting branches and sticks interwoven with anti-bird spikes, impaled and skewered with protest signs and handwritten notes. The making of the hostile nest seemed to have functioned as an outlet for a collective outrage directed at current humanitarian injustices and environmental fears for the future. As pointed out in the gallery text, ‘nature is our first host’. Perhaps it’s more useful to remember humans are a part of the natural world rather than separate from it. I was reminded of philosopher Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s vision of a struggling planet ‘prey to a voracious humanity eating its own nest’. The inclusion of anti-bird spikes acted as a powerful visual metaphor, alluding to barbed wire and closed borders and indicated an increasing absence of compassion for both human and more-than-human kin.
‘Wing Cradle, Cape and Talisman’ (2023-25) is a collaborative installation created by the artist working with Zana Adnan, a mother seeking asylum in the UK, the artist’s mother, Salme Hokka, and composer Erland Cooper. The narrative encapsulating the artwork is complex, entangling themes, personal herstories, ancient rituals, ecological grief, maternal devotion, animism and displacement. Suspended centrally in the main gallery space, a large, hammock-like, linen piece stitched with rows of white feathers drapes to the floor. The three enclosing walls provide generous, carefully curated space for two cotton/feather cape-like garments and a leather horse’s bridle, which hang loosely from the walls as if from coat hooks. The title refers to the archaeological discovery of a prehistoric burial site in Denmark where the body of a new-born child was discovered cradled in the wing of a swan.
Even without this explanation the feather capes emit sadness, appearing like empty wings, in particular the smaller, child-sized version of the two. I examined the rows of snow-white feathers and wondered what had become of the birds they originally belonged to, reading later that the feathers are a by-product of manufacturing. Industrial waste. Goose feathers considered too sharp and spiky for inclusion in coats or duvets. The audio recording (4’46’’) provides another layer of context. Through headphones Adnan pleads, and I’m momentarily disoriented by her appeal to ‘take my hand’. The audio plays on a loop, expressing in first person a mother’s desperation as she navigates a faceless, bureaucratic immigration system. ‘Take my hand.’ Beneath her anguish, distant sounds include the cry of the curlew, a threatened species through loss of habitat. The horse bridle, a relic from the second world war belonging to Asikainen’s grandfather, represents the artist’s personal experience of migration to the UK and her Finnish grandparent’s displacement from Western Karelia during the Second World War, the domesticated, mutually reliant relationship between human and more-than-human and the metaphoric notion of guiding or steering.
On the first floor in ‘Icarus’ (2023) a series of seven feather boa monoprints are displayed in horizontal orientation. As I recalled the details of Icarus’s demise when he flew too close to the sun, the row of images transformed into a series of broken wings and stray feathers floating and tumbling across the paper as if in stop motion. The mythical tragedy reads like an analogy of climate change, the fate of Icarus and the dire consequences of ignoring warnings were emphasised in three lines from Alycia Pirmohamed’s accompanying wall-based poetic text:
Our world is veering too close to the sun and the water is rising,
A bird disappears into the sea with a splash
no one and everyone is a witness.
A wall of the gallery is dedicated to the artist’s extensive archive of pressed flowers, leaves and grasses which have been collected and preserved as mementos. I identified many of them, common wild flowers (I recognise the irony): cow parsley, buttercups, hogweed, red campion, thistle, poppy among other species that are often overlooked, sprayed, uprooted, forced out to the margins by out-dated gardening practices and agricultural monocultures. Each carefully pinned specimen records a moment in time and a time of abundance that’s quickly diminishing. The wall suggests a future museum of lost habitats and biodiversity.
Asikainen’s workshops resulted in five unique structures. I imagine each nest becoming a fleeting agent of belonging for its participants. A feeling reminiscent of the childhood attachment to a den. In a white cube setting, the socially sculpted ‘Nest’ is bluntly juxtaposed with the other, more contained, conceptual elements within ‘Wing Cradle, Cape and Talisman’ yet, as an object of ‘un’belonging, it corresponds directly with the audio recording and Adnan’s longing for sanctuary. The chaotic assemblage seems to visually materialise feelings of frustration and despair. Asikainen is a storyteller, weaving metaphor, visual poetry and recurring motifs throughout her work: myth and folklore, birds, ecological grief, displacement. They act as sign posts, guiding the audience through allegory to multiple layers of meaning.
A proximity to birds is always present in Lintukoto/Haven. They appear as fragments, mythical, part bird/part human forms. The bird as both tender angel and soothsayer harpy, simultaneously offering and demanding protection. Where there is lightness, there is also darkness and the exhibition’s narratives do not flinch from exposing hard truths. The artworks induce us to be vulnerable enough to show compassion and brave enough to notice when the birds start to fall from the sky.
The plants and creatures with which we coexist generate loci of relationships that help to form our world and embed within us connections to place. Through these synergies we make home, tending to a garden of mutual growth that benefits all living things. Since the closing of the exhibition and in a final collaborative action between Asikainen and Lancaster Arts, the components of ‘Nest’ have been re-located to woodland within the campus at Lancaster University. Reformed within the natural landscape, the structure will continue to extend its social impact, serving as a nexus for human gatherings and, over time, becoming an agent of belonging (home) for other, more-than-human communities.
Henna Asikainen: Lintukoto/Haven, Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster Arts, 24 March -16 May 2025.
Sam Pickett is a visual artist based in Lancaster.
This review is supported by Lancaster Arts.
Published 19.06.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
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