An honoration of three species we have lost.
A project by Emily Furneaux
OF LAND:
The Pinta Island Tortoise
The Ivory Billed Woodpecker
OF AIR:
The Smooth Handfish
OF WATER:
Words written and performed by Emily Furneaux
Composition and production by Isa Gordon
Backing Vocals by Isa Gordon, Conor Loughrey, Ryan Buchanan, Ruby Hirsch, Jack Sheehan
Recorded at Tramway, Glasgow, 2024.
These three tracks are the bare bones of the compositions which will be fleshed out in future live iterations both in London, England and rural Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland.
They have been made possible with the support of Creative Scotland and the Buzzcut Emerging Artist Award.
Waiting for Us is a performance in its developmental stages. It serves as a place to tenderly hold, and grapple with, those tricky feelings of planetary grief many of us are suffering with.
In its full form Waiting for Us is a ceremonial service; honoring and celebrating these three species in three distinct acts.
Each act will consist of the sharing of culinary delights, designed to mimic the diets of these species, accompanied by spoken eulogies, a choir and live electronics.
For enquiries, or if you’d like to keep informed about future iterations, use the contact form.
EMILY FURNEAUX
Emily Furneaux is based in rural Dumfries & Galloway; working across performance, writing, drawing, journeying and culinary events. Her practice is guided by her lived experience; often weaving autobiographical narratives into relatable shapes and collaborative processes.
Recent works include Ciggie Stories: Twenty Tales of Love & Sorrow - a collection of autobiographical writings in honour of her near twenty year love affair with the cigarette - performed live, in their entirety, at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, (2022) and Above & Alone - an ongoing dining project, bringing people together that don’t know each other to share carefully curated menus - iterations have occurred in her own home, in a forest park and on a busy thoroughfare outside Barclays Bank, (2020 - Ongoing).
ISA GORDON
Ayrshire-bred, Glasgow-based artist, honing a surreal sonic palette juggling as much from Glasgow's experimental club history as it does from tightly-structured dance music, Scottish folk, punk and electronica.
A producer and lyricist, cherry-picking the medium to serve the message. Her debut album For You Only (2022) and EP Clyde Falls (2023) were released on Optimo Music. Isa is moreover a collaborator, remixer, performer, and DJ.
The dates contained in these accompanying drawings refer to the dates these species were officially recognised, and the dates they were officially marked as extinct - there is much ambiguity with both. They do not do justice to these creatures’ histories that are far longer than ours.
It wasn’t until the mid 1700’s that the art of taxonomy (the science of naming species) was established. The Pinta Island Tortoise, first officially described by herpetologist Albert Günther in 1877, is known to have roamed Pinta Island for over 2 million years.
The process of Taxonomy requires dead specimens to be studied in controlled, lab environments, before they are deposited in an internationally recognised collection. Only one specimen of the Smooth Handfish has ever been caught; it remains in the Natural History Museum in Paris. Declared extinct in 2020 by the IUCN Red List, in 2021 its status was changed to ‘data deficient’ due to the insufficient survey of its potential existence.
A lack of data can make it difficult to mark a species’ as extinct; this in turn may be veiling the true extent of biodiversity we have lost.
In the United States a handful of researchers remain adamant the Ivory Billed Woodpecker lives on. However, The US Fish & Wildlife Service declared the bird extinct in 2021. Once a species is marked as extinct, any funds earmarked to preserve their habitat are removed - many fight to keep species listed as endangered for this very reason.