The reclusive Solitary Snipe and the malicious Satanic Nightjar are just two of the birds featuring in UTS design lecturers Zoë Sadokierski and Kate Sweetapple’s latest exhibition.

The joint exhibition, ‘Unlikely Avian Taxonomies’ results from ongoing research conducted by the pair on the International Ornithological Committee World Bird List.

The exhibition is part of an ongoing collaboration through which they re-categorised birds based on patterns in their names, then visualised these re-categorisations (or taxonomies) as posters, sculptures and books. Ultimately the exhibition demonstrates how designers play with the relationships between content, form and materiality to communicate information in visually engaging ways.

Through their research Sadokierski and Sweetapple identified 87 distinct and sometimes surprising colours that appear in bird names, from the Olivaceous Flycatcher, to the Citrine Warbler. Other groupings include: antisocial birds (ordered from the reclusive Solitary Snipe to the malicious Satanic Nightjar); birds with smutty names (e.g. the Agile Tit-Tyrant and the Erect-crested Penguin); and the obviously patterned, from the Greater Striped Swallow to the subtly striped Zebra Finch.

‘Unlikely Avian Taxonomies’ opens on 29 August and runs until 28 September 2012 at the DAB Lab Research Gallery, Level 4 courtyard, UTS Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, 702-730 Harris Street, Ultimo.

To view the pair’s work, head to cargocollective.com/pagescreen.