Horse and bird team up for art

Tom Kawara and Sally Parker are joing teams tfor a new art exhibition

A SWISS photographer visiting the Illawarra has teamed up with a local woman to present an art exhibition described as “a kind of dialogue between horses and birds”.

“When you see the little images they’re having a conversation. Really what I like to do with my work is tell a story,” local artist Sarah Parker said.

The exhibition, now showing at the Clifton School of Arts, features sculptures, paintings and drawings by Ms Parker and the works of Swiss photographer Tom Kawara

“I met Tom last year over a beer,” Ms Parker said.

“We met up at the Coledale Pub, because mutual friends were playing there in a band. We ended up chatting and he told me he was a photographer and left it at that. At the beginning of this year I went to his place and he showed me his work and it was great, and because we were working along the same lines of birds I thought it would be good to collaborate.”

Mr Kawara has been in Australia since September with his wife Katharina and children Hans (7) and Anna (5), who are attending Stanwell Park Public School.

“I’m Swiss (and) a quarter Japanese, that’s where the name Kawara comes from,” Mr Kawara said.

“I worked as press photographer for about 20 years in Switzerland and did a lot of sports photography, covering five Olympics.”

All of Mr Kawara’s recent photography has been purely for pleasure and of a fairly different subject matter to the top athletes he took pictures of for so many years.

“I wanted to do a sort of project for this show, not just pull out images that I already had, and the cockatoos, I stumbled upon them by chance because I like things that move,” he said.

“I’m not very good at posing things, so I like things that move and I’ve used what I learned shooting sport in this project.

“Cockatoos catch the light very nicely and they were right in front of my doorstep, so they were perfect.”

Mr Kawara will exhibit 15 photos of cockatoos in flight taken near his home in Stanwell Park during the past few months, as well as photos of some local trees.

Mr Kawara’s wife is a nurse and was hoping to volunteer at Coledale Hospital before returning home with her husband in May, but Mr Kawara said the hospital had had problems processing her application to volunteer and didn’t think it would end up going ahead.

The exhibition is on show until April 1.