The Sparrow Made Some Beer

There was another steady font of archaic Baltic narratives infiltrating my life, alongside the girlie werewolves and the artist books. For close to three decades, I have sung with one or another Melbourne-Lithuanian folk group, notably as a member of Pamesta Klumpė/The Lost Clog which formed fifteen years ago. Like myself, all ten members of the group (including my husband, Jonas) are Australian-born to Lithuanian parents. Occasionally, my folk-singing world intersected with my art world when I invited (begged) The Lost Clog to perform at selected exhibition openings, but the two spheres were to become inextricably entwined through an unexpected catalyst, the lagerphone.

I have been making lagerphones – a quintessentially Australian bush-band percussion instrument in the form of used beer caps hammered to a stick – for Lost Clog performances soon after the group formed, when the group’s leaders decided a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of the Australian side of our cultural identities would be fitting. Being something of a bower bird, I happened to have a collection of bottle caps at the ready, drawn to their shiny, colourful promise of ‘gold’ from ‘straw’. I began to consider how the rustic folk instrument could serve a second function as a visual prop, arriving at rehearsal with a stallion lagerphone. This was soon joined by an owl, a rooster, a toad, a snake, inspired by the nature motifs in the songs we were singing. As people began to collect their bottle caps for me and my stockpile of available colours swelled, the menagerie grew.

The lagerphones satisfied my waste-not want-not compulsions, particularly as the timbers were also salvaged from hard rubbish and skip dives. I enjoyed being able to produce a finished outcome in a few days, instead of a few months, released from the pressure of creating Art. I enjoyed the challenge of creatively re-imagining the circular units of jewel-like colour as shimmering fur or feathers. I delighted in uncovering new ways of modifying or attaching the caps so that they created a different sound. I loved the totemic resonances of the forms and the fact that these highly visual props also served a practical, musical purpose.

I never set out to exhibit the lagerphones. Too low brow. Too kitsch. Then again … as more and more people, including fellow artists whom I respected, started asking when the exhibition would be, I began to wonder if what was true of the female werewolf was also true of the lagerphone. Perhaps it was time to give myself permission to go there.

A gear shift occurs once a pastime is promoted to serious creative pursuit. I still had difficulty regarding individual lagerphones as standalone artworks, but conceded that something transformative happened once they were grouped en masse. I began to conceive of an immersive, totemic forest of lagerphones, one with Baltic megafauna such as bear, moose, deer and boar. I felt obligated to take on more ambitious lagerphones with broader percussive possibilities requiring more advanced woodworking skills and more inventive modification of caps. I became a regular fixture of the shared woodworking workshop at Artery Cooperative, where I have my studio, generating more than my fair share of saw dust.

Critical to exhibiting the lagerphones was a sympathetic solution for making them self-supporting. After a couple of false starts, it dawned on me that I could make stands from the same salvaged timbers, decorated with the same bottle caps. If the stands were in the form of flora, they could begin to suggest habitats. As the supply of green caps ran low, it further dawned on me that alternative colour schemes could be utilised to suggest different seasons, snowflakes and autumn leaves.