Oiseau

Mounted pin-brooch, 2009 aterials: 18ct yellow gold, silver, pink and red coral, fire opal, water opal, matrix opal, onyx, 18ct white gold pin

height (without pin): 46mm width: 39mm ount: mixed media Signed and dated artist’s no: 429.MP-B.09

For their courtly beauty, wit and accomplishments (which is to say that they think we are worthy of study and flattering imitation) the parrot family, and especially the mystic Macaws, deserve a status beyond a description merely relegating them to a sub-group of bird: they are other. Birds, nevertheless, they be; and I have elected one of their special kind to represent OISEAU because of their astonishing way with the phonics of our language. Oiseau is one of the shortest words in common usage to contain all five pure vowels – those open, sustained, legato notes of speech which, in a sense, are the ‘colours’ of breath itself. In English, there are other special minimal words displaying such a Royal Flush of vowels, but they owe much to their classical ancestry and are limited in currency: the purest – ‘Iouea’ – for example, is an extinct (Cretaceous) type of sponge, while the Aristotelian ‘Eunoia’ (εύνοια) is a refined medical description of the healthy mind, and now also the title of an experimental work by the poet Christian Bök. My favourite, however, remains the borrowed oiseau and, ideally, uttered from the magical throat of one of its own.