Description
Thanks to support from Merrell, BIPOC Outdoor Gear Library is proud to partner with Shan Seahra (PhD) and the artists of the Moth Garden Project (Christina and Lisa).
On this guided NIGHT hike you will be lead along a wide, flat and mowed trail to the Moth Garden created by local artists Christina Kingsbury and Lisa Hirmer. The two will lead a short tour of the garden with opportunity to encounter moths and caterpillars using UV flashlights. Afterwards Shan will guide the group on a short walk to a moth sheet (small hills and tree roots along terrain) where you will discuss who, what, why, how of the moth sheet and visit with some more moth friends. After the moth sheet, a wooded trail and habitat river walk will bring us back to the parking lot to end.
You will be provided with headlamps (bring your own if you have one - red light feature suggested). We recommend wearing sturdy footwear (let us know if you need to borrow shoes/boots from the Gear Library - indicating size), and long sleeves/pants. If you have a bug jacket and would like to wear it, feel free (we may have a couple for those who need it). Please DO NOT wear bug repellent.
An image showing the location of the Loyala House parking lot is included here. Note: that Ignatius is a religious property and there are religious imagery and symbols along some of the trails.
See below for more about your guides and the garden.
NOTE: This event is intended as a safe space for BIPOC Community Members. You are encouraged to show up exactly as you are; and are guaranteed dignity, respect, and a feeling of belonging.
YOUR GUIDES:
Shan (she/her)
Shan Seahra is an ecologist and researcher. She has always been fascinated by biodiversity and its evolutionary and ecological drivers. She is keenly interested in exploring the behaviour and ecology of moths, and how they interact with plants, predators, and the environment, including humans. Shan's other interests include ecological restoration and native plant conservation, and she sits on the board of directors for Pollination Guelph.
Christina (she/her)
Christina Kingsbury’s interdisciplinary art practice is inspired by histories of care and explores themes of place, ecology and inter-species relationships. Christina’s work is rooted (often literally) in the ecology of the Grand River Watershed and the treaty lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit and part of her practice works through relationships to land as a settler person.
Lisa (she/her)
Lisa Hirmer is an interdisciplinary artist working in visual media, especially photography; social practice/community collaboration; performance; and occasionally writing. Her work is focused on collective relationships—that which exists between things rather than simply within them— both within human communities and in human relationships with the more-than-human world.
THE GARDEN:
Moth Garden is an artist-made garden for moths and other nocturnal pollinators. In a world where attention, care and conservation efforts have a bias towards creatures who align with human perception—the big, the beautiful, the colourful—Moth Garden is a project that wonders how we can relate to beings that are harder for our bodies to perceive. It is a poetic gesture that attends to the tiny and the barely visible around us.
Moth Garden invites visitors to spend time in the dark with nocturnal beings and hopes to offer embodied, sensory experiences at the edge of one’s capacity for perception: perhaps the flicker of moonlight off an iridescent wing, a fluttering felt on the skin, or a rhythmic thrum in the eardrum as a moth flies by.
Moth Garden is funded by the Canada Council for the Arts
