Big Bird – Liliana Stafford

Liliana lives just outside Fremantle. She does not tell people she lives in WA or even Australia.

‘Fremantle is where I live,’ she said firmly. ‘It has the beach, the ships, the old buildings, the quirky ats community and the river. Home is Hamilton Hill.

‘We bought the house for the old jacaranda tree in the garden, the shed, and for me it’s proximity to Manning Lake where I walk all year round and where most of my inspiration comes from. It is full of birds.

Liliana is a multimedia artist, moving from pen on paper, to brush on canvas, to glass sculpting. Through her multiplicity of artistic approaches Liliana navigates various intriguing facets of human spirituality and psychology. 

‘Art is a way to discover who I am and my go to place when I’m feeling the world is a bit too hard to take.’

Some concepts explored in her work include: desire, perseverance, the importance of community, human capacity for good and our vital and layered relationship to the natural environment. Liliana isn’t interested so much in making exact simulacrums of the things that snag her attention, rather her intention, is to capture something or someone’s essential essence.

‘I don’t need to make a bird but I do want to capture the birdiness of birds and I want to create work that touches the heart because then there is hope and hope is a wonderful thing.’

Liliana is inspired by the natural world, as a result her paintings and sculptures take on organic shapes and textures. To achieve these naturalistic forms, Liliana works with wire, stone, tissue paper, mixed media, paint and glass. Her sculptural pieces look like delicate remnants of an ancient fae kingdom.

Her figures often wear earth-toned felt garments, their hair wispy and wild, arranged with believable movement, as if windswept. Liliana has a folk lore-ish twist to many of her creations. For example her small glass houses designed to represent the yearning for home, a concept or an actual place. She calls them Hireath houses, as derived from the Welsh concept. Some of the houses of this series, roost on stilts and present an array of colours and spindly patterns, sometimes a suggestion of bricks and other times more abstract designs:

‘I create them to remind me there is for each of us a place we call home whether real or imaginary. A place we keep safe in our hearts.’

Liliana is further inspired by folk tales from the British isle when making her bird sculptures. She calls them her Seelie birds, connecting them to the Scottish mythology of the Seelie Court, a court of fairies that live outside the human realm but interacts with them from time to time. These birds are made from many different materials, soap stone to glass and tissue paper. Liliana has done several exhibitions located on the foreshore, and there is a beautiful photo of a set of these birds sitting on short wooden pillars at sunset. Being cast glass, they tend to posses a cloudy quality, similar to sea glass and hold light in a way that makes them seem like they are glowing from within. Liliana is not only inspired by folklore from further afield but also by the life in her own back yard

She particularly loves birds and finds them to be a huge source of inspiration. ‘They are both fragile and strong and they can fly which allows them to have a wider point of view’

Liliana’s own work seems to embody this idea of a bird. Delicately wrought, with enduring ideas at their centre. Media that ignites Liliana’s creativity traverses strange new worlds that present the familiar in unfamiliar ways and vice versa, promotes following one’s heart, caring for the planet and the people around us whilst also having guts.

She offers these titles as some of her favourites: ‘The Little Prince of course and Owl Babies. Films – Babe, Avatar, Barbie, Erin Brokovitch.’

When it came to her kite design she was unsure at first. ‘I fell asleep worrying about deadlines and whinging that I had no idea what to do. I woke at 4am with ideas everywhere to where I had to get up and do a quick sketch.

‘Then in the morning the name was there and I knew I had it.’

Liliana believes it is important to let creativity flow through her, and seeks ways to unleash these untapped creative channels through play, even something like using her non-dominant hand to draw. This progression from anxiety to waking with an overflow of ideas, serves as a reminder that allowing the subconscious to percolate can yield unforeseen creativity that might not have otherwise emerged.

She is always cultivating an openness to new ideas. ‘The challenge, the expectation and the constant searching for that perfect piece that says what is in my heart. And the joy that often follows a happy accident of knowing you somehow created something good.’

Of her own experiences with kites she says, ‘We flew kites as children, on the South Downs and at the beach.

‘It was wonderful but often ended in tears with my kite stuck up a tree, sailing away into the clouds or tangled up with my brothers. My older brother always wanted to be the best at everything so if my kite flew higher he would deliberately tangle our strings and make it crash.

‘One day we were on the Downs flying kites and my brother was flying his prize tissue paper and balsa wood model plane. My Uncle Eric, who was kind of aware of how my brother was, used my kite to dive bomb the plane. He said he was sorry but..?’

Liliana’s kite employs wire, beads and layers of tissue paper like the delicate creases of an eyelid or a palm, even a mountain range seen from very high up. The kite is coloured in a dappled pattern of shades, from brown to purple, bright yellow to variations of turquoise.

by Adelaide Stolba