MOTH GARDEN

Moth Garden is a long-term project by artists Lisa Hirmer and Christina Kingsbury

We started building Moth Garden in 2021 and the project is ongoing.

Moth Garden is an artist-made garden for moths and other nocturnal pollinators. In a world where attention, care and conservation efforts have a bias towards creatures who align with human perception—the big, the beautiful, the colourful—Moth Garden is a project that wonders how we can relate to beings that are harder for our bodies to perceive. It is a poetic gesture that attends to the tiny and the barely visible around us.

Moth Garden is a public artwork meant to be experienced at night. It aims to place the human body into a sensory world of other beings, where our dominant senses get quieter and other, quieter senses come alive: the flicker of moonlight off an iridescent wing, a fluttering felt on the skin, a rhythmic thrum in the eardrum as a moth flies by, simply the sense that there are beings around. We see this experience as a re-attunement to the more-than-human world, one in which possibilities for being otherwise open up when the human body is decentred. 

Moth Garden invites visitors to spend time in the dark with nocturnal beings and hopes to offer embodied, sensory experiences at the edge of one’s capacity for perception that open up richer ways of relating and caring for the more-than-human world around us.