Woolly Bears! Needle Miners!
A closer look at new artists’ book
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
Bilateral Symmetry
2024
24 page barn fold, pamphlet stitched, artists’ book, with pop up components and narrative (by Gracia Haby), Indigo Digital CMYK on 160gsm ecoStar + 100% Recycled Uncoated, with cover, Indigo Digital CMYK on 300gsm ecoStar + 100% Recycled Uncoated
Printed by Bambra
Bound by Louise Jennison
Edition of 100
We’ll be launching Bilateral Symmetry from our stall at the tenth NGV Melbourne Art Book Fair. Until then, read on, about treehoppers and fleas, and pre-order a copy through our online store.
A miniature lock and key, forged of iron, steel, and brass, gave rise to the flea circus boom, or so the tale goes, when Mark Scalliot, a 16th Century smithy, fashioned to his lock and key, a fine chain of 43 links which he in turn fastened “about the neck of a flea, which drew them all with ease. All these together, lock and key, chain and flea, weighed only one grain and a half.” Created “for exhibition of trial and skill”, it coincidentally highlighted the finesse of a single flea (Pulex irritans), and so we have orchestrated, in our own exhibition of skill with scissors and files, a theatre for insects. Though this time around, our fellow exhibitors, the insects, all, momentarily pressed within our artists’ book, Bilateral symmetry, are untethered and unglued upon the unfolding paper stage. And all weighing no more, it is estimated, than 1662 grains of gold, once bound in book form.
Here, you’ll find no tiny carriages in a show of horological prowess. Not for them an ivory “landau with figures of six horses attached to it — a coachman on the box, a dog between his legs, four persons inside, two footmen behind, and a postillion on the fore horse, all of which were drawn by a single flea[i]”, like that of watchmaker Sobieski Boverick, sparked some two centuries after Scalliot. The handbill, were there one to read, could not, would not, boast the following: “Come and see the LIVELY FLEAS… Fight a Dual, with Swords, Walk the Tight Rope a la [acrobat Charles] Blondin” and when harnessed like horses draw and drive “Mail Vans, Funeral Cars, Cabriolets” in Professor Kontili’s “Wonderful Roumanian Flea Circus… patronised by Royalty, Nobility, & Clergy”[ii] alike. An advertisement to Signor Bertolotto’s “Extraordinary Exhibition of Industrious Fleas from Regent Street, London” in 1834[iii], where admission was priced at one shilling per curious, with admittance “from 10 till Dusk”, an equal ill fit.
Less under the microscope, like Robert Hooke’s unveiling of the smallest writ resplendent and large[iv], with fleas et al. on a scale “as if they were lions or elephants seen with the naked eye”, in Micrographia, this invitation extended is perhaps more, under the leaf, as you crouch by a potted plant and behold the wonderful world of insects, thrumming. Not all of them fleas, in fact, after all that, possibly only one. Not all of them fully transformed, from egg to larvae to pupa to adult, either. But all of them in a state of doing their own thing. When hearing organs are everywhere, from “a place on wings of lace / To make an ear in haste”[v], to crickets and katydids storing their tympanal organs within their kneecaps; while the mosquito parks theirs with their antennae, and the scarab beetles, upon their necks; what need is there for the four-wheeled carriage.
Fluttering to the left, the black and white winged Fodina ostorius, as known now (though when painted glorious by the Scott sisters, Helena and Harriet, in 1893, this particular moth was recorded as Catocala albo-fasciata). In caterpillar form, he is said to favour the scented milk vine (Marsdenia suaveolens). Add the occurrence, record the location, on the Atlas of Living Australia’s Spatial Portal. To the right, popped, Dysgonia solomonensis, now, though before she was winged, as an early pale green instar, she was noted as a contortionist, given to reclining upon the concave edge of a leaf. As an adult moth, she is renowned for eye and eyebrow markings upon her cloak, and more besides.
Come to marvel, yes, but in a different sense.
Come to see how, by hiding in plain sight, treehoppers, from the family Membracidae, communicate through a variety of jiggles as they “rapidly contract muscles in their abdomen[vi]”, generating vibrations that travel along the plants from where they are positioned, and travel up the legs of nearby treehoppers. Making use of the “strong, flexible, and springy” nature of plants, “which makes them fantastic carriers of surface waves” insects fill “plants with their vibrational songs”. Could this, in your palm, be how a plant appears when it is a theatrical stage to the vibrational songs of treehoppers? Tuned in to the frequency, we wonder, what is it like to eavesdrop on such a choir of communication? At a botanical branching point, were you under the wing of an Acacia-horned treehopper, which vibrational song cue would you pursue?
Perhaps you’ll see patterned a startle display of red and blue stripes across the darkened form of an Australian mountain katydid who went off on a morphological tangent[vii]. Or the Varied Dusky Blue with their attendant ant[viii]. “Insects not only fascinate by their endless variety of external form, but also by the astounding diversification of their behaviour — aerial manoeuvres of flies, foraging of ants, concerted swarming behaviour of bee colonies, singing of crickets, dramatic flights of two male beetles. Observing the lives of insects can not but intrigue…”[ix] Come let’s metamorphose, should a butterfly alight upon your head, for ‘it foretells good news from a distance’. Come, recast the superstition: ‘if a butterfly enters a house, a death is sure to follow’.
Woolly Bears! Needle Miners! Hatted Caterpillars! Hello. Down an ecological porthole[x], we flitter, paying attention to the messages the ears on our chests might receive were we a mantis. Waving to those we’ve only just met. Flies, lacewings, wasps! There are so many types of you[xi].
Come, reader, as you retract your head from the verdurous foliage of a nearby plant, let us together tackle declines in insect abundance[xii] and diversity in rare and abundant species. For though there are many types of insect species, we are losing them too fast. For though there are many types of you, we’re losing you too fast.
[i] Ernest B. Furgurson, ‘A Speck of Showmanship: Is that Pulic irritans pulling that carriage, or is someone just pulling our leg?’, The American Scholar, Volume 80, No. 3 (2011), p. 92.
[ii] Publicity for Professor's Kontili's Flea Circus, which involves fleas performing ballet, fighting a duel, walking the tightrope and drawing carriages, circa 1900 (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images).
[iii] In Bertolotto’s The History of the Flea with Notes and Observations, published in the very same year, he introduces the flea as though “apterous, walk but a little, but leap to a height equal to two hundred times that of their own body”. He also praises their “large and beautiful” eyes.
[iv] Robert Hooke uses the terms “strength”, “unlike any other”, and “beauty” to describe the flea, and “all over adorned with a curiously polish’d suit of sable Armour, neatly joined”. Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London: Royal Society, 1665), p. 210.
[v] From Zoologist David Pye’s ‘B. Sequel “+36 years” (2004)’, on the ultrasonic sensitivity of the tympanal receptor in the Green Lacewing (Chrysopa carnea), to ‘Poem by David Pye: On the Variety of Hearing Organs in Insects, A. From Nature (1968) 218:797’, Microscopy Research and Technique, Volume 63, Issue 6 (2005), pp. 313–314.
[vi] Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (London: Penguin Random House, 2023), p. 193.
[vii] Kate Umbers, ‘Startle displays: a new route to resolving the aposematism paradox’, https://www.kateumbers.com/behavecol, accessed March 21st, 2024.
[viii] The Varied Dusky Blue, as a “Caterpillar, occasionally has an attendant ant (Ochetellus), but can also thrive without it”. ‘Candalides hyacinthinus (Semper, 1879), Varied Dusky Blue’ listing, Museums Victoria, https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/species/8273, accessed 12th February, 2024.
[ix] Anne C. von Philipsborn, ‘Methods in insect behavioural neurobiology’, in Insect Behaviour: From Mechanisms to Ecological and Evolutionary Consequences, edited by Alex Córdoba-Aguilar, Daniel González-Tokman, Isaac González-Santoyo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 32.
[x] Anna Badkhen, ‘Portholes’, Emergence Magazine, 19th October, 2023, https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/portholes/, accessed 2nd March, 2024.
[xi] “There are roughly sixty-five hundred species of mammals, nine thousand species of amphibians, and eleven thousand species of birds. These are what people tend to think of when they picture the world’s biodiversity. But the planet’s real diversity lies mostly beneath our regard. The largest family of beetles, the Curculionidae, commonly known as weevils, contains some sixty thousand described species; another beetle family, the Tenebrionidae, comprises twenty thousand species. It is estimated that in one family of parasitic wasps, the Ichneumonidae, there are nearly a hundred thousand species, which is more than there are of vertebrates of all kinds.” Elizabeth Kolbert, ‘The little-known world of caterpillars: An entomologist races to find them all before they disappear’, The New Yorker, 13th March, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/20/the-little-known-world-of-caterpillars, accessed 1st March, 2024.
[xii] “Over 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction… The main drivers of species declines appear to be in order of importance: i) habitat loss and conversion to intensive agriculture and urbanisation; ii) pollution, mainly that by synthetic pesticides and fertilisers; iii) biological factors, including pathogens and introduced species; and iv) climate change.” Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, Kris A.G. Wyckhuys, ‘Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers’, Biological Conservation, Volume 232 (2019), pp. 8–27.
Image credit: Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Bilateral Symmetry (detail), 2024, artists’ book
