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Berwick's work is about loss and the inevitable attempt to recover that which is gone.

She was inspired by a story, perhaps apocryphal, about the renowned eighteenth-century explorer and naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt. During his travels in South America, Von Humboldt was said to have acquired a parrot from a Carib Indian tribe which, some days before his arrival, had attacked and eliminated a neighboring tribe, the Maypure. Although there were no human survivors, the Carib tribe had taken parrots which the Maypure people had kept as pets.

Von Humboldt noted that the parrots were speaking words, not in the language of the tribe he was visiting, but in the language of the recently destroyed Maypure; thus, the parrots were the only living 'speakers' of the Maypure language. He phonetically recorded some of the bird's vocabulary; his notes constitute the only trace of the lost tribe. Berwick decided to work from the transcriptions of extinct language of the Maypure in this project. With the help of a linguist, a bird behaviorist, and a philosopher of languages who specializes in animal psychology, she trained two Amazon parrots to 'speak' Maypure.

The parrots lived in the aviary throughout the exhibition. Although the birds couldn't be seen directly, their shadows were projected through the translucent walls. With the viewer spending time in the exhibition, an uncertain clarity - there are the birds' shadows, that sound is a word - emerged. Amidst the shadows and sounds the viewer was invited to reflect on the imperfection of memory, the permanence of loss, and the profound and often poetic urge to recover the irretrievable.

.: Listen to the NPR Talk of the Nation interview with Rachel Berwick.