08 July 2019

With She changes everything She touches and everything She touches changes (Luna), Faith La Rocque and Ella Dawn McGeough presented a moth-to-light installation and invitational dinner as a companion to their Vanessa project from 2017.

Thank you to all of our guests, particularly David Beadle and Taylor Leedahl for sharing their knowledge, and to Aryen Hoekstra and Chris Stopa.

Influenced by the Luna moth (Actias luna), the aim of this evening event was to embody a more sympathetic relationship to lepidoptera. We created UV and mercury bulb light sculptures to attract moths to our gathering. Guests included members of the High Park Moth Study, landscape architects, a florist, artists, naturalists, and curators.

The event commenced with a welcome libation while encouraging everyone to turn off their phones to (potentially) reduce electromagnetic frequencies/radiation (EMF/EMR) which are posited to interfere with pollinator navigation. Happily, everyone agreed. We followed with a site acknowledgment and an informal collaborative drawing activity in pairs. Using various field guides, including the Peterson Field Guide to Insects of North America, one person verbally described an insect while another drew it based solely on the communicated description (i.e. without ever seeing it); after, the participants switched roles. Eating followed drawing. We served a green, planty-dinner grown by local farmers and moonshine cocktails infused with bee-balm from the garden. For dessert we ate artisanal bergamot ice cream made by Faith’s partner, Chris. As dusk settled, Ella read The Man-Moth, a poem by Elizabeth Bishop inspired by a typo, a slip of the finger: Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth”. The poem follows its title character’s attempt to scale the walls of the sky on his way to the moon.

After dark, our group donned silver thermal safety ponchos and congregated around the light sculptures to begin observing our moth visitors. Enveloped within this protective cocoon of reflective material, the ponchos were intended to open lines of sympathetic communication between our human guests and the light-sensitive moths. This material is also sometimes worn by internet-proponents to ward off EMF/EMR.

David Beadle and Taylor Leedahl of the High Park Moth Study group acted as our guides in identifying the various moth species who appeared.

Follow this link for an associated Luna Reader.