Katherine Pogson

‘TOWARDS… SOMETHING MORE LIVEABLE’ A MOTH JOURNEY

It begins with a place. A chalk-hillside, June. While my partner photographs rare native orchids, I start to observe the insects more closely.

It begins with a book. Thousands of colour photographs of living moths (Manley, 2008). Startling, disregarded, numerous – yet in steep decline. Gateway to another world, I still have not tired of this book.

It begins in the studio. A project responding to vessels in The Pitt Rivers Museum archive begins to ‘go all moth’. The textiles connection is obvious, reflected in the common names: Cloaked Carpet, Netted Pug. The structures begin to seep into my practice – yet I know it is not really about form. Colleagues and museum staff alike, react with bemusement, “Don’t they just eat your clothes?” I wonder what I am attempting to work out through this process.

And so, it begins. I begin to take moths personally. I stand up for, and with, moths.

9pm Hornsey Rise

Up the ladder to the roof.

The metal frame stretches up from my first-floor terrace onto a flat roof. I climb over the ledge, past the satellite dish, pulling my bag of cables, wooden slats and plastic jars behind me.

The North London evening sky is overcast, with the orange glow of sodium lights, and intermittent glimpses of moon.

In the act of stepping out onto this platform, I enter a different world. I can see into kitchens and living spaces, crowded together, remnants of a garden, the back yard of the pizza shop.

Immediately I feel the wind, the elevation of the hill, and sense the cardinal points –sunset and sunrise – in a way that I am woefully unable to do at ground level.

Unreeling the electric cable, I cast it off, lowering it through a skylight to a plug in the bedroom below.

A simple plywood box, with two angled sheets of Perspex over the top. The cable attaches to a fluorescent actinic bulb, which gives off an ultra violet glow and should not be looked at directly in case of retinal damage.

Feeling slightly ludicrous in my night-time sunglasses, I wait for the first wave of insects, the dusk flyers.

And here they come.

Their eyes shine copper in the torch light. You feel rather than see their approach, in a whirring set of wing beats, a percussive sensation on the ears.

Fragility is not the impression you receive, surrounded by dense, circling bodies, as the evening deepens. It is more a sense of urgency, of force of intent – as the moths home in, repeatedly diving towards the light.

6.15am Hornsey Rise

The struts of the ladder are sweaty with dew. The sun is already high enough to warm one side of the box.

And now the urgency is on my side. A cascade of diverse creatures, mostly inert, cling to the sides of the structure. A pale green geometer, wing-tips touched with crimson, escapes before I can photograph it. A huge Hawkmoth, the shape of a stealth-bomber, allows me to lift her on a piece of paper. She rolls back her grey wings to reveal bright blue eye markings on a flash of pink.

Panicking slightly as the heat rises, I feel a growing sense of responsibility. The roof is devoid of vegetation, exposed, and the vulnerability of these creatures in daylight is clear.

Birds gather, knowingly. An apparently expired moth lies on its back at the bottom of the box. I want to record, shelter and free them as quickly as possible. This short intervention of a few hours begins to feel like a trespass.

6.50am Woodberry Wetlands

At the nature reserve nearby, I have started a moth recording group. We monitor population levels and distribution, as many species plummet in number. A familiar story. Light pollution, pesticide use and climate change all play their part in a complex picture, but simple loss of habitat is key.

Cycling there through Finsbury Park in the early morning, I see my local patch from a different point of view. Noticing tents among the shrubbery, night workers asleep on the benches, I gain an impression of my neighbourhood, occupied in waves of time by different shifts of humans.

The reserve is a reed-fringed reservoir, surrounded by high-rise flats. Rounding the corner, the sound of birdsong is instant. The sun blazes through the tops of the reeds. The moth population here is quite different from my home a mile and a half away, and I begin to learn more about the intimate, evolved relationship between geology, water, specific food-plants and particular species. The seasons pulse with native and migrant birds, insects and humans, synchronised to the rhythms of vegetation and weather.

8.30am Blackstock Road

Down Fast Fashion Alley on the way to work, Arabic sequined gowns swing and Romanian lorries unload. In search of breakfast, I pass a series of food outlets: Lebanese, Uighur, Turkish, Ethiopian, Japanese. Within the almost instant access to global resources of an urban setting, food seems to be the most essential reminder of home.

Musing on my locale in terms of sustenance and supplies, I develop the thought that these synthetic imported textiles might be my most ‘local’ materials.

It occurs to me that the moths – those highly specialised, invisible creatures often thought of as a devouring plague – are simply being starved out of existence. What if they are famished?

9.45am Studio

“Conversations among ourselves have always had other participants” (Ghosh, 2016).

The objects I make are refusing to be accessories any more. They no longer want to talk to or about the human body so directly. I produce a series of very wrong things as this dialogue plays out.

Relinquishing habitual outcomes, materials and processes, I experiment with textiles in different modes and scales. My new subject matter begins to unfold thematically in terms of nourishment, procreation, shelter - appropriating the Maslow pyramid basic hierarchy of needs for nonhuman ends.

As my focus shifts, I look for collaborators and other outlets – writing, installation, workshops – ways of communicating through an expanded practice, the journey in itself.

Decentring the human has liberated me from the artefact, too in a way.

Conclusion

“... wayfinding, then, more closely resembles storytelling than map-using” (Ingold, 2000)

The narrative of my ‘moth journey’ leads from seeing nature as a resource, through attraction and curiosity, to direct observation, sensory enhancement and learning. This fosters a growing sense of empathy and ecological responsibility, which in turn prompts renewed cultural engagement and material action.

But what does it mean to ‘stand up for, and with, moths’ as a mode of creative practice?

If the problem of the Anthropocene is one of how to be, rather than how to act (Maggs & Robinson, 2016) examining the purpose of design in an age of ecological destruction requires a profound rethinking of what it means to be human itself. One role for design might be to develop practices which question human boundary constructs.

Survival, or “ongoingness,” (Haraway, 2016) entails fostering a sense of ‘self’ which inudes intimate ‘kinship’ with nonhuman nature. Inhabiting this more porous sense of being alive, we may begin to experience our actions as a form of ‘self-harm’. Practices such as these may help to dissolve the cognitive rift which seems to paralyse privileged nations from feeling sufficiently the negative effects of human actions, which we so efficiently document (Conrad et al., 2006).

This journey embodies two paths: one which leads away from making, and one that returns to it.

The first path requires “disciplined thinking combined with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go” (Meadows, 1999). Intriguingly, this implies liberation rather than denial – the forward momentum of moving on from practices which societies have outgrown.

Part of this will entail relinquishing materials and habits which are limiting and harmful. More ecological ways of relating trigger changes in consumption behaviour, political and cultural expression, which are design outputs in themselves, with or without artefacts.

For design, this suggests an uncoupling of the link between established economies of desire and new ideas about value, to redirect the creative urge outward and away from production, towards community engagement, resilience-building and knowledge-sharing.

The second path requires a deeper engagement with materiality.

Design solutions reliant on industrial processes create “simplified ecologies” – a symptom of “life-world disengagement” (Tsing, 2016). Accepting the contradictory, uneven “muddle” of the present, paradoxically releases blockage. For complexity and entanglement suggest richness, biodiversity - hope.

Practice implies habit. My exercises in sensitivity, or ‘attunement’ (Morton, 2018) begin, simply, with what is close by. Engagement with my local ‘place’, its inhabitants and processes, has given me an entry point into a joyous world of layered themes, images, activities and connections.

Aware of the anthropomorphising potential in imagining ‘the moth’s point of view’ I nevertheless find value in this starting point.

I appropriate the textiles vocabulary of repair, care, and human domesticity, to speak about a creature usually associated with damage, nuisance and contamination. This inversion allows me to explore overlooked stories of neglect, destruction and unintended consequences.

Through this approach I attempt to untangle and redirect what is materialised through the act of making, in order to ask the question “what truly nourishes you?”

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References

Conrad, K.F., Warren, M.S., Fox, R., Parsons, M.S., Woiwod, I.P. (2006) ‘Rapid declines of common, widespread British moths provide evidence of an insect biodiversity crisis.’ Biological Conservation. 13, 3.

Ghosh, A. (2016) The Great Derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, Durham.

Ingold, T. (2000) The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling & skill. Routledge, London.

Maggs, D., Robinson, J. (2016) ‘Recalibrating the Anthropocene: Sustainability in an Imaginary World.’ Environmental Philosophy, 13, 2.

Manley, C. (2008) British Moths and Butterflies, a photographic guide. A & C Black. London.

Meadows, H. D. (1999) Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, Hartland, VT: The Sustainability Institute.

Morton, T. (2018) Being Ecological. London, RSA event, 29 January 2018. Available at: https://www.thersa.org/events/2018/1/being-ecological

Tsing, A. (2016) Earth Stalked by Man. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 34 (1) pp.2 – 16.