Using bones, leather, claws, fur, feathers, hair, grasses, sticks and other detritus found in the landscape.  I began making tribes of small scale totem like figures accompanied by their interwoven stories in the form of poems.  Totems and Poetry, Spirit Wall and In This County are intentionally small-scale intended to evoke identification from the viewer.  With their connotations and relations to the landscape these anthropomorphic figures become fragmented glimpses of my own life, memory, and vision.  But enshrined together, in a highly textured, three-dimensional figurative combination, they assume a new and singular existence. 

Writing in the St. Louis Post Dispatch Paul Harris says, “Drawing freely upon the cornucopia of Earth’s mythological archetypes, Birdsall Lander has set out to convey fleeting essences of the spirit world-an elusive world that’s permanently bound up in the realm of dreams.”

Of the totems and poetry Lexi Bellos, in the Riverfront Times, comments “...Birdsall-Lander’s poetry is evocative, lyrical and as beautifully crafted as her sculpture.”

In the St. Louis Post Dispatch Carol Ferry Sheapley states, “Birdsall-Lander expresses concepts about relationships so original that they can only be seen in this metaphorical context. “