Florida: Feathered is the first installment in Gaby Viteri's ongoing bird study, All My Friends Are Birds. The work reflects her sustained engagement with Florida's landscapes, wildlife, and ecosystems through ceramic form, repetition, and direct observation.

What began as a single ceramic plate depicting a state bird became the origin point of the series. That first work established an inquiry into belonging, identity, freedom, and our relationship to place. A gesture became a study; an impulse, a meditation.

The series has since expanded into a body of twenty-two wall-mounted ceramic works, each depicting a Florida bird, including a pelican, egret, scrub jay, roseate spoonbill, and other native and naturalized species. Together, the works form an evolving field of attention rather than a fixed set of portraits.

Grounded in repetition, seriality, and birdwatching as a method of sustained observation, the installation brings together the personal and ecological. Viteri paints from birds encountered in shared spaces and habitats, where looking becomes a form of attentiveness shaped by proximity and duration. The work emerges from lived observation as much as visual research, positioning artist and subject within overlapping environments.

Only after completing the twenty-two works did Viteri begin to recognize the parallels between the birds and her own life. As her son prepares to leave the nest and she navigates a move of her own, questions of family, independence, and the changing meaning of home began to emerge from the work. What had started as an exercise in observation revealed itself as a meditation on attachment, separation, and the tension between holding on and letting go.

The birds also invite a broader consideration of boundaries and territory. Birds migrate across landscapes without regard for the borders humans impose. Their movements raise questions about belonging, displacement, and immigration: Who has the right to occupy a space? Who determines where one belongs? And what happens when the need to move conflicts with the desire to remain?

These questions exist alongside ecological concerns, where habitat loss, preservation, and our relationship between nature and humans are central. The birds remain identifiable, preserving their distinct characteristics alongside a deliberately irreverent approach. Their individuality becomes part of a larger consideration of identity, family, migration, and the human relationship to place.

Through repetition, Viteri sustains a practice in which observation becomes both a form of documentation and a way of processing change. The act of returning to the same subject, again and again, creates a space for contemplating the relationship between permanence and impermanence, attachment and independence, and the instinct to protect what we must eventually release.

Birds sing only when they feel safe. This idea underpins the series' broader consideration of the conditions that allow life, human and more-than-human, to flourish. Home becomes not simply a physical place, but a condition of belonging, one that can be carried, reimagined, and eventually left behind.

All My Friends Are Birds debuted in October 2026 at MTN Space Gallery in Lake Worth, Florida.