Canary 3

Canary 3 is a hand-built porcelain sculpture by the Portland, Oregon, artist Kate MacDowell. It represents a pair of human lungs, complete with trachea, whose interiors have been opened up to reveal small canaries perched on twigs inside. The catalogue records the date as 2010. MacDowell is known for porcelain works that fuse human anatomy with animals and plants to make points about humanity's damage to the natural world.

What you are looking at

Seen from the front, the sculpture is a recognizable pair of lungs in unglazed white porcelain. The surface is covered with a fine network of polygonal cells, like the texture of real lung tissue or of leather. A ribbed windpipe rises between the two lobes at the top.

Each lobe has a large, irregular opening cut into it, its edge thickened and rippled. Inside, as if in two small caves or birdcages, sit canaries: three or four in each lung, perched on thin branches that grow from the inner walls. They are modeled in careful detail, with folded wings, short beaks and small round eyes. Some look out, some turn away. The inner walls are carved with a honeycomb pattern suggesting the alveoli, the tiny air sacs of the lung.

Everything is the same matte white. Without color, the birds and the organ become one material, and the eye has to work to separate them.

The canary in the coal mine

The title explains the image. From the late nineteenth century until the 1980s, miners in Britain and elsewhere took caged canaries underground. The birds were more sensitive than people to carbon monoxide and other gases; if a canary showed distress or died, the miners knew to get out. "Canary in the coal mine" became shorthand for an early warning of danger.

MacDowell places the canaries inside the lungs themselves. The body becomes the mine, and the birds become the warning signal of what we breathe. The work points to air pollution and its effects on both people and animals, and suggests that human health and the health of other species cannot be separated.

How it was made

MacDowell hand-builds her sculptures in porcelain rather than casting them, carving and modeling fine details before firing. She has said she was drawn to porcelain partly for its translucence and its associations with fragility and preciousness. That fragility mirrors the subject: the thin walls of the lungs, like the birds, could break.

Where to see it

The current owner of Canary 3 is not publicly recorded. For more of MacDowell's work in the catalogue, see Solastalgia; for other works linking the body and nature, see Flower Figures Nº02 and Thrive.