Even Birds Do Not Worry
Jemima Yabes

We live in a world that takes so much yet refuses to give. Empty tables, unpaid bills, ailing bodies, crumbling dreams. It is as if all this life has known is to damage, deprive, and deny reprieve.
And when we always stand to lose and to lack, worry becomes poison that cripples the fearful heart. With this, Jemima Yabes offers something that the weary must hear: even birds do not worry – thus each of us is worthy of hope and peace.

Taking off from the Bible’s Matthew 6:25-31, Jemima Yabes in Even Birds Do Not Worry surrenders her fears and turns to the Biblical verses’ flowers and birds. Yabes likens these to the flora and fauna of her afternoon walks – her sights and sounds as she seeks rest in the middle of her days. In transposing the passages’ textual subjects into visual form, she transforms the gallery walls into a garden of promise, home to her faith.

This move towards beauty and optimism appears antithetic to her previous queries. After a long interest with multispecies death, Yabes found it imperative to finally seek the hope drained by her encounters with meat carcasses, dead animals, and other morbid scenes. Thus, in this exhibition, she continues her inquiry into the organic but fills her subjects with life, albeit delicately. Firecracker flowers and white angel plants bloom in soft renditions of reds, oranges, and pinks. Maya birds perched in apparent stances of rest, inside the protective shelter of their homes. Equally salient as these scriptural life forms is the structure that offers them sanctuary – the literal and figurative homes of safety and repose. She paints all these in subtle hues and static postures, in seeming wonder of how life happens despite quiet and ease, absent of the familiar perils of our everyday.

By depicting a contrast between survival and inaction, calmness and vitality, Yabes suggests that life persists amid silences and standstills. In this world that refuses to give, our lives become a bustle of worries and hours at work. But while we may fail to see that tomorrow is guaranteed, Yabes reminds us that one is not made to live in fear. As she finds life from the common flowers, birds, and homes, she signals that comfort is possible even from the most mundane of reminders – the same comfort that she found from the firecracker flowers and the maya birds of her afternoon strolls.

Thus, returning to its Biblical springboard, the exhibition is a gesture towards hope – an assurance that we are as deserving of sustenance and protection as the birds of the air and the flowers of the fields. Worry is natural for the one who loves and therefore fears. But let the flowers and the birds bring us faith in a life that provides – tomorrow, and for all our days. //

by Chesca Santiago