Tanya Poole
Span and The Night Guide
Statement of the artist
A moth is a nocturnal pollinator, drawn to the luminosity of pale flowers and their rich fragrance in the darkness. I imagine their fertile nightly flights in moonless forests or dark fields, drawn to drifting scents and pale luminescence.
A year ago, as I moved my home from South Africa to France, I also experienced other powerful shifts within, as my body moved through into menopause. Moths fluttered around the edges of my consciousness, ephemeral, only partially visible. I noticed them more and more, attracted to them for their quality of inhabiting a between place. If I saw them as they were motionless on a surface, I would get as close to them as possible and sometimes photograph them with a macro lens so that I could zoom in and see the hidden intricacy of their wing-scale patterns. Their wings were mostly monochromatic, not bright or eye-catching, but the more I looked, the more extraordinary I understood them to be and I fell into them like into a rabbit hole.
I started to make paintings of them in sketchbooks, but as the moths' visual complexity revealed itself to me, I knew that I needed to paint them much, much larger and that my small sketchbook observations wouldn't describe this vast and previously unseen richness. I made two large-scale paintings on paper: Span (3 metres wide) and The Night Guide (2 metres wide). Ink needs space to live and the size of the large-scale paper allowed it to run, pool, dissolve and layer. In painting the moths this size, I also realised that I had made their bodies close to the size of mine and that I could drape and wrap the painting over me like a cloak or a chrysalis. Thinking through making their outsize dimensions made me feel able to convey my sense of the moths as monumental or mythic creatures, perhaps celestial beings - as if the pale flowers they visited in the darkness were stars in the inky sky.
Span, the title of the largest moth, is a word that describes the space between two points in time or in space and in doing this it also describes the thing between: the span of a hand, the span of wings, the span of a life, the span between continents, the span of the firmament.
Span in the group exhibition Borderlines of Space, Galerie m
A moth is a nocturnal pollinator, drawn to the luminosity of pale flowers and their rich fragrance in the darkness. I imagine their fertile nightly flights in moonless forests or dark fields, drawn to drifting scents and pale luminescence.
A year ago, as I moved my home from South Africa to France, I also experienced other powerful shifts within, as my body moved through into menopause. Moths fluttered around the edges of my consciousness, ephemeral, only partially visible. I noticed them more and more, attracted to them for their quality of inhabiting a between place. If I saw them as they were motionless on a surface, I would get as close to them as possible and sometimes photograph them with a macro lens so that I could zoom in and see the hidden intricacy of their wing-scale patterns. Their wings were mostly monochromatic, not bright or eye-catching, but the more I looked, the more extraordinary I understood them to be and I fell into them like into a rabbit hole.
I started to make paintings of them in sketchbooks, but as the moths' visual complexity revealed itself to me, I knew that I needed to paint them much, much larger and that my small sketchbook observations wouldn't describe this vast and previously unseen richness. I made two large-scale paintings on paper: Span (3 metres wide) and The Night Guide (2 metres wide). Ink needs space to live and the size of the large-scale paper allowed it to run, pool, dissolve and layer. In painting the moths this size, I also realised that I had made their bodies close to the size of mine and that I could drape and wrap the painting over me like a cloak or a chrysalis. Thinking through making their outsize dimensions made me feel able to convey my sense of the moths as monumental or mythic creatures, perhaps celestial beings - as if the pale flowers they visited in the darkness were stars in the inky sky.
Span, the title of the largest moth, is a word that describes the space between two points in time or in space and in doing this it also describes the thing between: the span of a hand, the span of wings, the span of a life, the span between continents, the span of the firmament.
Span in the group exhibition Borderlines of Space, Galerie m
The Night Guide, 2019
Ink on Paper, 140 x 200 cm
Ink on Paper, 140 x 200 cm
Span, 2019
Ink on paper, 140 x 300 cm
Ink on paper, 140 x 300 cm