Night Vigil is a body of felt, wire, and embroidered sculptures-giant, tender evocations of critically-endangered South African moths. Created in collaboration with the Keiskamma Art Project in the Eastern Cape, these artworks are more than representations of insects: they are acts of mourning, resistance, and attention. Inspired by the ecological philosophies of Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose, Night Vigil embodies their insistence that extinction is not merely the end of species, but a slow, unfolding unraveling of complex, interwoven lifeways.
Each moth sculpture is rendered tactile and enlarged-not just to emphasize its beauty, but to counter the shrinking visibility of these pollinators in our imagination and ecosystems. In van Dooren's terms, this is a refusal to let these beings "die unnoticed." These sculptures do not serve as nostalgic relics or decorative artefacts; rather, they are vigils-nightly watchings over the edge of absence. In a world where habitat loss, pesticide use, and climate instability steadily erase the delicate places where moths thrive, this work calls us to hold vigil with them in their disappearance.
The collaborative process behind Night Vigil is itself a form of multispecies and multihuman care.
Working alongside women artists in the Eastern Cape-many of whom have an intimate relationship with land, weather, and loss-the process of stitching, felting, and shaping became a shared act of attention and empathy. Deborah Bird Rose often speaks of extinction as a rupture in relationship, not only between species but between knowledge systems, histories, and futures.
In this way, the work does not only grieve for the moths, but also for the ecologies of knowing and living that vanish with them.
Moths are ancient nocturnal navigators, attuned to lunar rhythms. But the industrial revolution-and the endless expansion of electric light-has thrown them into a state of disorientation. They are now caught in a choreography of distraction, circling artificial lights that pull them from their paths. In this haunting spiral, one may sense an unsettling mirror to our own distracted lives-lured by consumption, urgency, and digital glow. Night Vigil attends to this distraction with empathy, not as projection, but as shared vulnerability: we too are confused by the lights we have built.
In van Dooren's thinking, extinction calls not only for documentation but for "storying" the lives that are at stake-telling their particularities, their habits, their roles in the world. These moths are not symbols, they are histories: pollinators, signs of seasonal change, kin to birds and bats and blooms.
In enlarging them, Night Vigil refuses the anonymity of decline and instead creates spaces where their memory can be felt, touched, and mourned.
Ultimately, this work asks: how do we make loss tangible? How do we hold the slow violence of extinction in our hands and respond? In its softness and scale, its collaborative heart, and its quiet nocturnal reverence, Night Vigil becomes an act of
"tactile theory"-a gentle, necessary unsettling. A vigil not only for what is gone, but for what still flickers, barely, in the darkness.
