Out of the Darkness: Masters of the Night
In her essay The Death of a Moth Virginia Woolf describes a moth trapped in her window. “Watching him, it seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body”. She shows us the grandeur of the tiny moth and invites us to reflect on the meaning of life and death. Her identification of the little invertebrate with its vital but fragile life force takes on great poignancy with recent research drawing attention to the decrease of moths across our country.
I have been absorbed by the beauty of the moths, the complex patterning, the stripes,the circles, the geometric designs as they emerge from the darkness into the light. When you look at these tiny wisps of life with the intensity of a photographer you can see that their symmetry is exquisite, perfect in every detail and far finer than any human art – a treasury of abstract art, and proof that science and art can merge.
