The Birdcage

2022 Bermuda Biennial

The Birdcage
2022
Wood and paint

Jacqueline Alma
b. 1965, South African
Currently lives and works in Bermuda

Jacqueline Alma was born in South Africa and worked as a designer in London before moving to Bermuda in 2008. She has held two solo exhibitions on the island, The Red Thread (2013, Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art) and Like a Tree Let the Dead Leaves Drop (2019, Bermuda National Gallery). Her artwork looks both outwards, at Bermuda’s history and culture, and inwards, at her own experiences.

Her 2022 Bermuda Biennial artwork references the Birdcage, a Bermuda landmark situated at the corner of Front Street Street and Queen Street in Hamilton. The structure takes it name from Geoffrey ‘Dickie’ Bird, the city’s first engineer, who designed the structure in 1962 to shade policemen who would often be stationed there to direct traffic.

Of her Biennial artwork, Alma says: “I’d like people to come and express their version of Past, Present and Future via a photograph of them standing in the birdcages. People can choose how to express it by the way that they stand within the frames. Perhaps it could it be an elderly member of their family for the past, themselves for the present and their child for the future? Or will they stand holding messages in each frame expressing their emotions around the history of Bermuda, their present feelings of today and their hopes or fears around the future? How imaginative will they be?”

Special thanks to cTx Design Group and SJ Construction 

The 2022 Bermuda Biennial A New Vocabulary: Past. Present. Future., sponsored by Bacardi Limited, is on display at the Bermuda National Gallery through to the end of the year.