This work is related to another work made by Kay Walsh in the Sarjeant collection, also made during her Tylee Cottage residency called "Candy Twitcher" which is modelled after a mai mai. It is the artists intention that "Peekabo" was created to be viewed through the "Candy Twitcher".

"As with many residents at Tylee Cottage, the body of work that emerged during the residency was far from her original proposal. In fact, it was the mynah birds that frequent the garden of Tylee Cottage that inspired the work Peekaboo, a two-screen video work. After initially filming the birds at the cottage with limited success, even after constructing a cardboard mai mai (bird watching hut), Walsh discovered a bird named Trouble that lived at a nearby bird sanctuary. Mynah birds are an exotic species, having come to this country from Australia, and are particularly loathed for the fact that they kill native birds by a single blow to the back of the head. Peekaboo allows us to see back and front views of Trouble’s head, and the bird is in a kind of double captivity – firstly in the bird sanctuary and secondly entombed in the technology of video and two flat-screen monitors. "

"Kay Walsh arrived in Wanganui in December 2009 to undertake a three-month residency at Tylee Cottage. Wanganui-born and currently London-based, Walsh has been overseas for more than twenty years. It was never her intention that she would make London home; it just happened, as things do. The residency at Tylee Cottage allowed her to return and spend an extended period of time in her ‘home town’, Wanganui.
Walsh comments: “Ideas around states of transition and loss of ‘locatedness’ run through much of my work. Having left Wanganui more than twenty years ago to relocate abroad, I have positioned myself both geographically and emotionally at a distance from a place that remains home. Through this estranged position, a set of questions has arisen about what makes ‘home’. “Is it a state of mind, familiarity, the people, or a memory that informs my relationship to this place that I continue to call my home town?”
Having come from an inner-city environment, Walsh found picturesque Tylee Cottage on its exposed corner site a dramatic contrast. Facing the street, the cottage has something of a ‘goldfish bowl effect’, with the feeling that people are watching you as much as you are watching them. Arriving in December, Wanganui was relatively ‘vacated’ for the holiday period and rather than the constancy of noise in London, Walsh found it was replaced by silence and solitude."

Both sets of text by Greg Donson in exhibition introduction from "When time slides by slowly" 27 March – 23 May, 2010