Miró's conception of sculpture during the later phase of his career continued to draw on the ideas of Surrealist assemblage that he practiced during the late 1920s and 1930s, in the creation of his painting-objects. In his Working Notes, 1941-1942, jotted down in Montroig, the artist wrote:
when sculpting, start from the objects I collect, just as I make use of stains on paper and imperfections in canvas...make a cast of these objects and work on it like [Julio] González does until the object as such no longer exists but becomes a sculpture, but not like Picasso--do it like a collage of various elements...it is in sculpture that I will create a truly phantasmagoric world of living monsters; what I do in painting is more conventional... build myself a big studio, full of sculptures that give you a tremendous feeling of entering a new world...unlike the paintings that are turned facing the wall or images done on a flat surface, the sculptures must resemble living monsters who live in the studio--a world apart.
(reprinted in M. Rowell, ed., Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, Boston, 1986, p. 175)
Miró finally built the "big studio" that he desired in 1956. He filled it with found objects and created what Jacques Dupin called "Assemblage-Sculptures" (in Miró, Paris, 2004, p. 373). Miró assembled L'oiseau se niche sur les doigts en fleur from casts taken from a mannequin's hand, a tree stump, and one of Miró's own modeled and engraved clay tiles. He took these objects and joined and projected them as interacting visual metaphors. The tile has been transformed into a owl-like bird, the hand into a flower growing out of the tree and visited by a butterfly. The tree is both an organic form rooted in the earth, and a plinth which supports the smaller objects of the sculptor's choosing. Dupin has written:
Miró's first concern is not an aesthetic one, not that of the beauty or singularity of forms. The sculptor in him is caught by the energy and radiance of the object, its potential force, which he first tries to capture, so that he may then contain it, but in order to reinforce it with the interplay of parts he brings together... The work of assembly, on the floor, is rough and irreverent. Miró, with artless audacity, takes very little trouble to restrain the forms, inflect the lines, modify the volumes or specify the dimensions. He is seeking, above all, to release the secret structure of the encounter he has provoked, to find exactly the right proportion and to further free the forces combined. It is a question of the energy circulating and harmonizing the incongruities, without lessening the violence, the humour or the pleasure of the confrontation (in Dupin, op. cit., pp. 12, 13-14).