For the Love of Lepidoptera

By Greg Thomas, 06.07.2023

Installation view, Monster Chetwynd, Moths, Mount Stuart Trust, Isle of Bute, 2023 © Monster Chetwynd. Courtesy Mount Stuart Trust, Isle of Bute, and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Keith Hunter

The film playing in the crypt of Mount Stuart House sets the tone for Monster Chetwynd’s Moths, an exhibition inviting us into childlike rituals of communion and communication with an often unloved and overlooked group of animals. Towards the end of the 12-minute work, delightfully called ‘Meeting at the Potting Shed’, the Isle of Bute’s local “moth-men,” Ron Forrester and Bill Stein, tell us that, while there are only 59 species of butterfly that regularly visit Great Britain, there are over 2,500 different moths, most of them permanent residents. Moths are all around us, yet in spite of this – or perhaps partly because of it – our creative culture and folklore has traditionally paid them little heed. In an education space attached to the gallery, I open a pamphlet called ‘Gardening for Moths and Caterpillars’ whose list of “moth myths” hints at further reasons for this exclusion: “all moths are nocturnal,” it reads; “moths are drab and brown;” “moths are always furry;” “all moths eat clothes.”

Chetwynd’s film, shot on a mixture of Super-8, black-and-white, and cine film, features a cast of local children, lepidopterists, and gallery staff, some adorned in pasty, pagan moth-makeup, with headdresses and sheer body suits of various autumnal hues. Through a series of playful transmogrifications in and around the Mount Stuart grounds, moths become human-sized and humans become moth-sized. There are Lewis Carroll-esque garden parties with giant cavorting insects, secret doors in trees, and more. A nostalgic children’s-TV quality prevails, with soupcons of folk horror and shonky, seventies British sci-fi. The use of retro special effects and not-so-beastly papier-mâché outfits is part of the effect and appeal. We are invited to reinhabit our youth, or perhaps invited into the artist’s memory of her own youth, to take this journey with the moths. The artifice is always visible: we can see the puppet strings, the lines round the green-screened figures. But like children, we are immersed in the game though know we are pretending.

Across the crypt and family bedroom are a series of oversized sculptures of different moth species found on the Isle of Bute – where Mount Stuart is located – many of them used as props in the film. There’s the black-and-red Garden tiger moth, the furry-legged Nut tree tussock, the Emperor moth with its majestic antlers, and more. At first their construction seems a little crude, but it’s all in keeping with a kind of summer-fete aesthetic. Made from cardboard, craft-shop fur, and sticks, they look less like fine artworks than things put together in the potting shed (with love, care, and childish glee). A series of pretty, velvety-clouded paintings from Chetwynd’s ongoing ‘Bat Opera’ series, and a reconstruction of her 2011 ‘Folding House’ installation complete the show. The latter, located on the front lawn, is an enticingly rickety set of sculptures created from found doors and windows. They almost have the feel of self-build plotland houses, evoking a suburban, interwar arcadia of allotments and jerry-rigged holiday huts.

This is a show with a light heart. But it also has something to say about coaxing us into forms of imagined community with the less feted fauna we share our planet with, at a time of environmental crisis. On a summer day, it’s a pleasure to be with the moths.

Monster Chetwynd’s Moths is exhibited at Mount Stuart until 20^th August https://www.mountstuart.com/whats-on/monster-chetwynd-moths