Award-winning artist Wallis Bird is collaborating with German classical quintet Spark on a new album, Visions of Venus, showcasing 1000 years of female composers, from Clara Schumann to Joni Mitchell, Björk to Hildegard von Bingen. Visions of Venus will be released on Friday, 19th April, 2024.
To celebrate this thrilling news, Wallis Bird and Spark share an original song, ‘Dr. James Barry’, today, International Women’s Day (8th March), to honour the titular feminist physician.
Dr. James Barry was a prodigious and visionary leader of the medical world at the turn of the 19th century until his death in 1865. Barry, who was born Margaret Bulkley, was, by virtue of their era and their gender, afforded no future in academia or a career, regardless of their incredible talent.
So, Barry’s mother devised the name James Barry, and sent him to the University of Edinburgh to begin his life as healer.
Until the end of their long life, Dr James Barry lived an open and full life as a trans man, his birth gender only revealed when an autopsy was ordered, against his wishes, to be performed.
Barry was the first person to be “recorded” to perform a successful caesarean section, a procedure which he had learned from the local women healers in South Africa while posted there. He was well known, well respected, and liked particularly by women because of his, at the time, unique caring disposition towards them, yet was also heavily chastised by his seniors because of his “radical vision” of what the medical world should be. His activism for the lower class, treating the poor and destitute with equal honour as the ruling class, led to him coming to blows with his seniors. Dr. James Barry was sensationally demoted from Surgeon General for “behaviour unbecoming of a gentleman.”
Wallis explains: “I pondered the extremities of his mental wellbeing and what it must have been like to be a radical and compassionate feminist academic genius healer in the most masculine and violent of fields—to fight regardless of the cost to their career—because they believed in humane treatment for the destitute. What benevolence! What wildness! The fact that he was a trans man gave me a solid anchor as to where this beautiful courage and resilience came from.”
Berlin-based Wallis and the group Spark met at a state reception at Bellevue Castle in summer 2019 when Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier hosted Irish President Michael Daniel Higgins. Wallis was invited as a prominent cultural representative of German-Irish relations, and Spark thrilled the audience with a private concert.
For years now, Spark have been leading the way in creatively breaking down musical barriers in terms of aesthetics, sound, form, and genre, marked by a baroque-playful questioning of artistic norms.
Wallis is one of the great Irish singer-songwriters of our time and, much like Spark, is a rebel. Sometimes a rocker, sometimes a gentle poet, she is always searching for her very own sound, never thinks in labels, and never allows herself to be pinned down. In her songs, she wears her heart on her sleeve and reflects on personal experiences, but is also a lively and astute advocate for female empowerment and the LGBTQIA* community.
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