Each ‘casket-cocoon’ contains a multitude of emotions and moments of human encounters with nature, and reaches for an understanding and an imagining of the outer world. However, its inner world is full of gaps as species continue to decline and huge swathes of land goes under-recorded. How can it acknowledge the absence of not only the moths and butterflies that are ‘unseen’ but also a greater diversity of humans and landscapes that are missing from its data? The casket-cocoons swirl with this confusion and grief, and yet the dataset still hopes and dreams and there is a beauty in that hoping and dreaming.
— Bryony Benge-Abbott
Pictured at the JASMIN data centre, home of the butterfly and moth dataset.
“I think I fell in love a little bit with our dataset as its narrative emerged. Its non-linear, questioning, dark-wood dream is the journey the world is beginning to take – a journey that begins with regarding nature as something ‘other’, something that can be reduced to its constituent parts, and moves beautifully towards a merging.” — Poet Thomas Sharp
Thomas Sharp invents worlds, campaigns and artistic moments with language at their heart. He’s spent his life thinking about what writing can do. Amongst other patrons, he has been commissioned by the British Library, Historic Royal Palaces, English National Ballet and Henry Moore Foundation. He grew up in an English West Midlands village. After he left they dug up an old field and discovered Europe’s largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure. He accepts this as a metaphor. His poetic and artistic world is informed by Chaos Magick, the Romantics and DADA. His work is about language, consciousness and the divine.
