Martha
Artist: Nora Marleen
Thousands of precious items stored away in steel cabinets.
Fluid preserved specimens, bones, stuffed birds and curiosities.
Amongst them: Ectopistes Migratorius.
The North American Passenger Pigeon. It used to be the most common bird of the world.
At the beginning of the 18th century 5 billion passenger pigeons obscured the sky over America.
Wherever a flock settled, trees broke under their weight.
But then the great hunting began.
For many years, day after day, millions of pigeons were caught, slain and shot.
Until there was none left.
Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died in the zoo of Cincinnati in 1914.
That this was about to happen…
… Nobody could have imagined.
Nora Marleen was born in 1990 and works since 2016 as a freelance illustrator in Berlin. She studied Illustration at the FH Münster and spent one semester in South Korea. Then she moved to Hamburg and studied at the the HAW, where she graduated with a thesis on female sexuality. Her works have been shown in several exhibitions at home and abroad.
noramarleen.de