Walking as Remapping: Night Walk in the Moth Garden

The Moth Garden is an artist-made garden for moths and other nocturnal pollinators created by artists Lisa Hirmer and Christina Kingsbury at Ignatius Farm.

Jun 22.2024

Time

9:00pm - 11:00pm

Location Ignatius Farm

Price Free

Join the artists for a nighttime walk to the garden under the full moon where participants will spend time observing the vibrant world active during the nighttime as well as their own sensory responses to the night. Guided by the artists, participants will explore how to shift their sensory perception, and consider how other beings, like moths, sense the world.

Participants will meet in the parking lot and the walk to the garden is about 15 minutes along a gravel roadway with mowed grass paths which have some uneven surfaces and slight to moderate inclines. Because the garden and walk involve encounters with other beings in their own sensory worlds, please avoid the use of insect repellants and other scented products. Bug suits will be available, or you are welcome to bring your own. We also recommend wearing long sleeves.

Please check your email in the afternoon if the weather looks ominous as we will be in touch as soon as possible if we plan to reschedule. We are tentatively holding June 23 at 9:00 pm as a rain date. Otherwise, we will be outside for the program and so encourage you to dress for the weather with comfortable footwear for walking. Bring your curiosity, creativity, and a sense of adventure!

This event is presented by the Art Gallery of Guelph in partnership with the Department of Geography and School of English and Theatre Studies with the support of the University of Guelph Wellness@Work program.

Image detail: Lisa Hirmer and Christina Kingsbury, Moth Garden, 2023, materials variable. Photo credit: Lisa Hirmer

About the artists

Lisa Hirmer

Lisa Hirmer is an interdisciplinary artist who works in visual media, social practice; community collaboration, and occasionally writing. Her work is focused on collective relationships—both in human communities and in human relationships with the more-than-human world. A lot of her recent work wrestles with what it means to be living inside the climate emergency. Her work finds home both in traditional gallery contexts and an expanded field of other public and semi-public spaces. It is always created with a keen awareness—informed by a mixed Mexican- and European-newcomer Canadian background—that multiple realities exist alongside one another.

She has shown her work across Canada and internationally including at Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Guelph, Cambridge Art Galleries, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Peninsula Arts, CAFKA, Queens Museum, and Flux Factory, among others. She has done artist residencies with Arts House Melbourne, the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, KIAC and Camargo Foundation, and was the 2022 Waterfront Toronto Artist in Residence. She has received numerous grants including from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts and has a Master of Architecture from the University of Waterloo.

Christina Kingsbury

Christina Kingsbury’s interdisciplinary art practice is inspired by histories of care and explores themes of place, ecology and inter-species relationships. Her work takes the form of performance, installation, social practice and sometimes text based work. Christina collaborates regularly with poets, ecologists, artists, choreographers and the public – including ecological public – to create relational works that offer a quiet and radical challenge to the commodification of life. 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. Her solo and collaborative work has been shown as public interventions, in curated exhibitions including Embassy Cultural House, Cambridge Galleries, the Art Gallery of Guelph, the Gladstone Grow Op and at events including Kazoo Fest, if International Improvisation Festival and ALT/Futures: Eco_Hack (New York and Taiwan). She has been granted awards for her work through the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Guelph Community Foundation.