Working with trends (in some way), as we more or less do here at Up Your Wall, it has been impossible to escape the current bird trend. The urban people of today seem very fascinated by birds, birds and birds. This spring Swedish magazine Filter wrote an article about Club 300, an association competing on whom that has seen the highest number of bird species in Sweden. In July, swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter wrote about the young hipster bird watchers in Stockholm, oscillating between sourdough baking and bird watching. The bird trend is even more apparent in today’s interior design. When interior design blog Trendenser and web gallery Arty People held a competition where you could win an optional artwork from Arty People, it was obvious that the artwork Hushed by Amy Dover with the motive of a bird was the most popular. Because of the popularity of bird artworks, the Tumblr-blog Put a bird on it was founded, featuring artwork only with birds on it. Our own Jenny Capon’s Stockholm Map Birds are some of Up Your Wall’s most sold artworks. What is it about birds that we like so much?

Maybe, the trend has something to do with my generation – people born in the eighties. As Dagens Nyheter write in their article, “it is precisely this generation – which have grown up with recycling know-how, ecological thinking and which carbon dioxide traps you should avoid – that enters a natural romantic relationship with their environment”. Being utterly aware of the effects of our urban lifestyle, we naturally seek for objects that symbolizes the opposite, objects that live and inhabit the nature as well as the cities – the birds. I don’t know if I’m right about this, but maybe it’s part of the answer. Or maybe we just think that birds are beautiful?

Above left: “Hushed” by Amy Dover, for sale at Artypeople.se
Above right: “Robins” by Jenny Capon, for sale at Up Your Wall
Below left: parts of “Willow Warbler” by Jenny Capon, for sale at Up Your Wall
Below right: Bird watchers in Stockholm. Image from Dagens Nyheter. Photo: Ann-Sofi Rosenkvist