The Pigeon Homing Project
2007
The Pigeon Homing Project is a kind of adoption agency for city pigeons, based on homing pigeons and their keepers. Rather than adopt a real bird, participants in the project select a life-size painting of a real pigeon living in an urban location. The painting is recreated at floor level, directly on the wall of the participant’s home. Slowly these feathery characters are moving out of the parks and into houses and apartments. The birds belong more to the home than to the adoptive human, just as homing pigeons return to their roost rather than their owner. I hope that as time goes by and people move to new homes, that these pigeons will remain behind to share the space with the next tenant. Each time I visited the home of a participant, I had the opportunity to discuss with them ideas connected with the project such as who we are willing to share space with, vagrancy, and perceptions of urban wildlife.
Once most of the pigeons had been given a home, I decided to make The Pigeon Homing Project Poster to reunite the flock on one page and also to act as a kind of abstract map or taxonomy chart that links all the people who have participated.