Back From the Brink

The story behind this exhibition is a positive one — a shaft of sunlight cutting through the noise and shadow of world events that can seem beyond our control. Back From The Brink is a reminder that, with enough goodwill, good science, and community effort, we can pull back from the edge — and that this is worth celebrating.

Fiona Smith’s paintings honour the work of conservationists and communities who have fought to rescue bird species from extinction. She is painting birds that almost weren’t here.

Every species in this exhibition was, at some point, heading towards oblivion — reduced to dozens of individuals, their habitats destroyed, their futures a ticking timebomb. But thanks to the global conservation movement, here they are: surviving, sometimes thriving, and depicted among a fiesta of flowers.

Among them, Brazil’s Lear’s Macaw — that vivid blue jewel of the caatinga cliff faces — was down to just 60 individuals in the early 1980s. Today, there are more than 2,500. The majestic Trumpeter Swan, hunted almost to extinction across North America, now fills the skies of the great northern wetlands in its thousands. In New Zealand, whole islands have been cleared of introduced predators so that birds found nowhere else on Earth have somewhere safe to raise their young.

Since 2000, 25 bird species have stepped back from the Critically Endangered list. Of course, this is a drop in the ocean compared to the ongoing loss of species worldwide — but what these stories deliver is proof of something vital: that humans have the ability to repair some of the damage we have caused. That we are better off saving this planet — the only one we have — than ditching it to hitch a ride on Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocketship to Mars.

This collection is determinedly joyful and playful. It focuses on beauty and wonder. Each painting carries a name that translates as “hope” in a different language.

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the reassurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”

— Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (1965). Carson, a marine biologist and naturalist, is best known for her 1962 book Silent Spring, which documented the devastating environmental effects of pesticide use — particularly DDT — on birds and ecosystems, and helped ignite the modern conservation movement.