FORM FOLLOWS FEEDING

About Facilitator

UNFOLD PROJECTS is a regenerative design platform restoring and cultivating spaces for conscious creative expression, led by founder + creative director, Mel Meagher. Mel is a regenerative designer, curator, arts advocate, and host of the Unfold Residency, which provides time and space for artists to rest and dream up ways to better their practices for the planet.

Jeremy Schipper Studio is an architecture, interiors, and landscape practice based in New York, with recent commissions in residential, hospitality, and cultural spaces. Materiality and craft are central to Jeremy’s approach, favoring wood, textiles, handcraft, and reclaimed materials. Mel and Jeremy are collaborating on the design of Unfold Projects’ Edition 02 in Idyllwild, California, which is currently in process. Applications for the winter 2027 residency at its first Edition in Encinitas, California are open!

Objective

Form Follows Feeding is a workshop in regenerative design and interspecies hospitality, timed to coincide with the fall migration through New York City. Participants will cast birdseed into unexpected forms—architectural fragments, fruits, grotesques, monuments, geometric abstractions and other strange objects—then put them out into the city to be eaten.

The visual surprise is part of the pleasure: uncanny sculptures appearing in gardens, trees or backyards are as much a small encounter for the humans who discover them as they are a meal for the birds.

October brings White-throated Sparrows, Song Sparrows, Chipping Sparrows and Dark-eyed Juncos through or back into the city, joining seed-eating residents and visitors such as American Goldfinches. They arrive alongside the much larger movement of flickers, kinglets, warblers, thrushes and other birds following the Atlantic Flyway south.

Beginning with a short introduction to migration and regenerative design, we’ll experiment with birdseed as a sculptural material: mixing it with a bird-safe biodegradable binder, packing it into an eccentric collection of molds, and thinking about texture, form, perching, hanging and placement. Each participant leaves with a sculpture to put outside. Birds, squirrels, insects and weather take it from there.

The evening will be accompanied by a bird-oriented playlist quite literally years in the making—part field guide, part mixtape. Continue the night with us after dark with a bird-themed cocktail next door at Rodeo Bar. 

What's Included:

• Materials for a take-home sculpture
• Birdseed-inspired snacks
• An after dark bird-themed cocktail at Rodeo

What To Bring:

• The appetite of a raptor
• An offering
• Your imagination!