Installation view of The Bird Girls, a memorial sequence of seventy-four [sumi](/glossary/sumi)-ink portraits on paper, each sheet representing a woman killed by gendered violence in Australia during the period the project documents. Tanaka-King renders each subject as a faceless figure with a bird's head, the avian substitution at once obscuring identity and conferring a folkloric, almost iconographic dignity on the sitter. The works are executed in diluted sumi on [washi](/glossary/washi)-style paper, exploiting the ink's characteristic tonal gradation — pooled blacks bleeding into silvered greys — in a manner closer to traditional sumi-e than to the flat keyblock-and-[bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) structure of [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e). Hung as a grid, the sheets accumulate into a wall of repeated silhouettes that reads simultaneously as portrait gallery, calligraphic field, and ledger. The piece is the most widely exhibited work in Tanaka-King's practice and exemplifies her movement between printmaking, calligraphy and public-facing social commemoration, drawing on her VCA printmaking training and her later study of brushwork with Kazuki Yamane in Kyoto.
The Bird Girls (installation view) was created by Alisa Tanaka-King in 2016-2017.
The Bird Girls (installation view) depicts birds & flowers, calligraphy, and children.
