Stuffed animals were a recurring motif in the work of Fina Miralles, as with this bird condemned to flying low as it insistently reaches for the air through a metallic mesh. When in 1979 this work was included in the exhibition Landscape at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, art critic Alexandre Cirici spoke of this artist’s new landscape art, charging exhibition spaces with caged trees and mounds of earth, filling mason jars with natural objects and displaying stuffed animals. In this way Miralles explored the dialectic between nature and artifice, reminding us that nature is, in and of itself, a dialogue between life and death: “The landscape of the air is represented by a stuffed bird, in flying position…. This alludes to life”, wrote Cirici at the time.