Telling Stories with Moths: Metamorphosis, Symbiosis and Loss in Art and the Anthropocene

This thesis is a project in speculative art history. In response to growing cross-disciplinary debates around our current ecological crisis, extinction events and the term “Anthropocene”, as well as calls for imaginative ways to respond to an increasingly damaged planet, this thesis proposes writing with art and moths as a mode to find new connections between species and new ways to engage with art through ecology and storytelling. Thinking alongside the three primary stages of a moth’s life cycle, or ‘habits’, this thesis offers a critical art history that begins with the biology and life history of moths. Since artists engage with moth habits in divergent and various ways, this thesis analyses several artworks through both visual and speculative threads. Together, the works collectively propose methods of art making in the Anthropocene that relies on interdisciplinary and interspecies sentiment.  Three moth species and three moth habits guide the thesis across three chapters. These are: the Bullseye Moth Automeris liberia; the Yucca Moth Tegeticula yuccasella; and Buller’s Moth Aoraia mairi. Chapter One focuses on metamorphosis. It considers the ways that moths are imagined in seventeenth century Europe and in contemporary multidisciplinary art practice. In the works of Dutch naturalist illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian, moths are studied and imaged as part of a changing environment and entangled with other insects and plants. Chapter Two turns to the symbiosis of between Yucca Moth and Yucca plant Yucca schidigera in the Mojave Desert. It examines the work of contemporary artists Mire Lee,  Tomás Saraceno, Anicka Yi and Pierre Huyghe. In these works, moths are engaged as figurations, real and imagined. Chapter Three analyses the one remaining image of Aoraia mairi known as Buller’s Moth to consider loss and extinction with works by Stan Brakhage and Hany Armanious.

Moths are intimately tied to speculative practices in art and writing and are relevant to contemporary efforts to attune to the lives of other species. Importantly, through the various and layered artists discussed in this thesis, it is clear that moths are not only symbolic figures, but also collaborating partners in art practice. In order to stay close to the lives of moths, this thesis adopts a creative and speculative mode of research. Finally, this thesis suggests that telling stories alongside moths is a method to imagine and uncover the various ways moths inform art practice in the Anthropocene.