Art-making memoir 4
The little things that run the world
Biologist Edward O. Wilson extolled them as “the little things that run the world”. Invertebrates. The most ancient, numerous and diverse of all visible creatures, without whom the biosphere could not function. Despite their biological importance, two unequal competing modes of encounter colour our reactions to insects. With a few exceptions (such as honey bees and butterflies) our default feeling is that they are unclean, repulsive, abject. The other is the suspicion they have inner lives. That they feel, know and want; that they, like us, are ‘selves’. Invertebrates are exemplary relational metaphors for me. On the one hand, they embody the possibility of reciprocity with the more-than-human world, and on the other, the actuality of their (and our) suffering, and tragedy.
Two sites in Victoria—semi-arid Lake Tyrrell and sub-alpine Mount Buffalo—have been the focus of most of the imaging I have made of invertebrates. It was over one day and night at Lake Tyrrell in 2009 I had an experience of the likely selfhood of insects.
All afternoon, my assistants and I had collected live Rhytidoponera meat ants from the sandy ground and the bark of the trees outside their nest. We collected them by flicking them from tree boles and branches with a soft paintbrush into plastic receptacles and siphoning them en masse from the ground into sealed, aerated containers powered by a hip-mounted electric vacuum pump. After dark, we placed an A3-sized sheet of pre-cut gelatin silver graphic arts film in a plastic photographic darkroom tray on the ground and poured the creatures in. We illuminated the set up with dolphin lamps capped by red safe lights (a colour the film was blind to and wouldn’t be fogged by). I then re-arranged the insects by gently corralling them, with a sheet of thin cardboard, into my desired compositional arrangement. At the right moment, I triggered the pre-calibrated flash, pointing down to the tray from its tripod support overhead. I lifted the exposed film up out of the tray, and tipped its creature contents out onto the sandy ground behind the tripod. Then I recorded another group of ants on another sheet of film after which I poured them out on an adjacent spot; then, imaged and jettisoned a third lot, further away, again. As soon as the ant recordings were completed, I packed the photographic films away in a lightproof box and asked everyone to turn on their torches. As we watched them by torchlight, the initial scatter was formless and random across four or five square meters of ground. Moving erratically, feelers out and jostling to find each other, the insects convened first in one then a second and finally a third distinct elliptical mass, each of perhaps five hundred individuals.
Many ants flowed from the outer edges of each group seemingly relaying messages between the massings, back and forth for about four minutes. A handful left the throng and scouted around for several minutes in the surrounding area before returning to the group. Another five minutes or so, and the three writhing crowds of what had been a chaos of frantically jostling feelers, legs and jaws slowed, calmed and for several startling seconds, detectable motion completely ceased. Then, a single ant broke off from the edge of the end circle followed by a single file of fellows, feelers to tail, trailing along across the warm sand. Once that elliptical throng had emptied, the next mass joined the conga line. After they had all departed, the third crowd sedately followed. As we walked beside the cavalcade, we realised it led to their destination, the sandy site two hundred meters away, where we had gathered them earlier in the day. One by one they were welcomed back, dropping into one or other of several holes in the sand leading to their underground sanctuary. My assistants and I speculated what they made of their involuntary photographic modelling. Inscrutable non-human selves.
Most of the sheets of photographic film recording invertebrates—bugs, beetles and moths, funnel web and wolf spiders, antlions, millipedes, termites, a scorpion and various species of those massed ants—are included in These Other Selves. One night my assistants and I were preparing to pour large ants onto the film when a Butler’s legless lizard Delma butleri unexpectedly wriggled under our feet. I scooped it up and dropped it on the film with the ants. The moment after we fired the flash the creature jumped off the film and disappeared into the night. I have scanned and digitally enlarged some Lake Tyrrell insect films as inkjet prints. Most are included in the series The little things that run the world. One film reveals the struggle and flutter of live small white cabbage butterflies (Pieris rapae) caught in a sudden downpour on the lakeshore, a moment of suffering in what German biologist Jakob von Uexküll called the umwelt or ‘life-world’ of creatures we habitually ignore. This butterfly is an introduced species whose presence typifies the growing ecological hybridity of Australia’s remaining indigenous semi-arid landscapes.The remainder of the enlarged and colourised Lake Tyrrell invertebrate reiterations are an on-going work-in-progress.
Swarms of Australian plague locusts, Chortoicetes terminifera, spread across the inland southeast over the summer of 2010–11. Locusts were, of course, one of the plagues reported in Exodus; and their swarming can feel almost supernatural even though it is a semi-cyclical natural event that performs important ecological functions, providing food for other animals and redistributing soil nutrients. I used gelatin silver paper to record them (and two dragonflies) at Lake Tyrrell. Using nets, and with the help of an assistant, I collected the insects on the wing in barrels during the day; at night, we poured them onto the paper and exposed them to a flash. I called the resulting diptych The Impossibility of Knowing the Mind of Another Kind of Living Being, as a parody of an artwork of a shark preserved in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst signifying ‘the impossibility’ of imagining death. In so doing, my work instead alludes to the difficulty of imaginatively entering into the subjective life-world of creatures such as these, so different from ourselves.
For my second insect-imaging site, I returned to Mount Buffalo in Midjambuta country, one of the places in a region I spent most of the 1980s photographing. Although back then, in my book Range Upon Range: The Australian Alps, I could justifiably call the high country “cool, rolling and serene” it has fast become less so. Shrinking snowfields, more frequent bushfires, feral invasion and advancing dieback from beetle infestation has already destroyed much of its native fauna and oldgrowth snowgum (Eucalyptus pauciflora) woodland. The country may still be high and rolling, but global heating combined with reckless land management mean it is becoming less and less alpine or biologically stable.
Bogong moths (Agrotis infusa), a keystone species in the region, symbolize this change. The moths begin life in winter as cutworms secreted in burrows at the base of plants on the dry inland lowlands of the Murray–Darling Basin. After the larvae have pupated, the adults emerge in spring to begin a migration south and east, feeding on nectar at dusk and flying at night en route to the caves, rock overhangs and dark crevices of the highest summits of the Australian Alps. Sheltered in those dark upland recesses, this tawny species of Lepidoptera (moths and butterfies) spend the summer aestivating (resting), and, pressed head under tail against each other like roof tiles, covering every suitable rock surface. In autumn, those that have survived leave the mountains to make the long return journey to their lowland breeding areas where they mate, lay eggs and die. The next generation repeats the cycle.
Alone among invertebrates, the moths navigate by celestial optical cues and an internal magnetic compass. At least four billion of them once migrated from the hot inland plains to the cool of the mountains each year, but pollution, habitat loss and climate change have devastated the moth populations and, in turn, other creatures that depend on them, such as the rare mountain pygmy possum (Burramys parvus). Pre-invasion they were feasted upon by indigenous Gunnai, Taungurung, Jaitmatang and Ngarigo clans each summer. In December 2021, Agrotis infusa was added to the IUCN Red List of endangered species.
On three visits over the summer of 2011–12, each with an assistant, I captured hundreds of moths dislodged from the walls of their aestivation cave at The Horn, Mount Buffalo, in daylight, to expose them to flash on film at night. I used a variety of methods to make shadowgraphs of them, including a pivotable rigid wire-edged pyramidal net with a hole for the flash at one end and a trapdoor for clipping the film on at the other. Like the ant collections at Lake Tyrrell, the moths’ gatherings at Mount Buffalo made evident their mysterious selfhood. They sometimes secreted an odourless fluid during capture, but the stress of the alien conditions I forced upon them did not induce conflict or aggression. Each time I opened the thumb-sized escape lid of the net after an exposure session, one individual would soon find it and, tarrying briefly at the hatch, turn around with feelers twitching as if telling others to come along, before flying out in the direction of the rocky hideout from where I had gathered them, followed by an orderly stream of all its fellows, close-on, head-to-tail. It appeared as if every moth in the net knew instantly how to escape and then where to go once one had found the opening. I have found few moths at the site since.
Bogong moth imaging at Mount Buffalo produced two bodies of visual art. The last to be resolved, an accretion of the gelatin silver film originals, reports Lepidoptera morphology and behaviour in seven montage assemblages. These fractured reconstructions of overlapping shivers recall the morphology of Lepidoptera wing scales, the memory of alpine caves floored with moth bodies—to quote a line from the poem Moth liturgy by my wife Annie Hunter— ‘a thousand years deep’. Called Minds in the Cave, the stacked films present Bogong moths as a bioregional icon and as indices of ecological tragedy. The other artworks are a series of prints on paper reiterating the scanned film. They are titled after the same poem, which alludes to fifth century BCE playright Euripedes’ last tragedy, Iphigenia at Aulis in which the innocent maiden Iphigenia is sacrificed by her father king Agememnon to enable war on Troy and rescue his sister in law Helen from her lover and that cities’ leader, Paris. Iphigenia’s plight is presented as analogous to the destruction we inflict upon the moths and their habitat, for our glory:
Tonally inverted, vividly colourised and greatly enlarged, the digital recapitulations are unmoored from the monochrome patina, diminutive life-scale and cold mountain context of the source negatives. It is an artifice that, paradoxically, invites a sense of agency and beauty in despised creatures that would otherwise be hidden: a liturgy of shadows inviting the pathos of imminent absence.
In a world blinded by anthropogenic glare, perhaps the most evocative poetic expression of our reciprocity with the more-than-human world and our tragic ecological condition is to be found among the abject and shadows.