In Matthew Battles’s Tree, ferality offers a way to rethink our relationship with the living world. This idea led me to foreground the birds that emerged unexpectedly within my Plant artworks. Unlike the plants, they belong to no taxonomy: they appeared algorithmically, unsolicited, and I chose to embrace them.

Sylva Bird draws on Battles’s account of Ailanthus altissima, a species that thrives beyond human intention, and on the ancient practice of reading birds as signs. Enlarged to human scale, these birds confront the viewer directly, collapsing distance between species and transforming observation into encounter.

They are neither reconstructions of endangered species nor projections of a future ecology. They are unclassifiable presences, inhabiting the threshold between nature and artifice, memory and invention. Sylva Bird embraces this ferality as a form of vitality, resisting purity, taxonomy, and control while proposing an ethic of coexistence with hybrid, unpredictable, and indeterminate forms of life.