Trigger warning: there are 17 gigantic spiders on the walls of Canberra Museum and Gallery and they are hairy and have eight eyes each.
Clarification: in real life these spiders are only about 5mm across but large-scale, one-and-a-half-metre photos of these eight-legged, fanged arachnids are on show at the exhibition Maria Fernando Cardoso: Spiders of Paradise.
Arachnophobes need not apply.
It’s worth overcoming your spider aversion, however, just to see the work of famed artist Maria Fernanda Cardoso, who’s exhibited at the Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and now CMAG in Canberra.
It’s a lovely coincidence that the Cardoso chose Australia’s Maratus spider (peacock spider) for this exhibition because a Canberran once discovered a brand-new species in our own backyard.
Back in 2008, “spider man” Stuart Harris discovered a new species of peacock spider – named Maratus harrisi in his honour – in Namadgi National Park (he was testing a new macro lens).
So having an art exhibition dedicated to the peacock spider, which flourishes in the ACT (Black Mountain and Mont Majura Vineyard are hotspots), is very apt.
For Cadroso, the Maratus spider holds a special place in the natural ecosystem.
The exhibition is centred around 17 large-scale digital photographic portraits of various Maratus species, showing off their brightly coloured abdomens that form part of elaborate mating rituals (the males are famous for their vibrantly coloured abdominal fans and elaborate, disco-like courtship dances).
Cardoso worked with renowned scientific imager Geoff Thompson and entomologist Andy Wang from the Queensland Museum, who specialise in deep-focus microphotography and microscopic specimen preparation, to create the large-scale photographs.
Each image is made from more than 1000 individual photographs, revealing the spiders’ colour, texture and form in extraordinary detail.
With such intensely detailed focus, the peacock spider is both stunning and the stuff of nightmares.
Cardoso is world famous for using large-scale to emphasise the wonders of nature, particularly of the small.
She blends art, science and close observation to reveal the sophisticated visual language of creatures usually unseen.
One of her most fabled projects is The Cardoso Flea Circus, a performance piece featuring real live fleas. Over the course of a six-year period, Cardoso trained fleas to perform surprising feats such as walking on tightropes, pulling chariots, jumping through hoops and dancing tango.
This time around though, there are no real live spiders, just larger-than-life images.
No doubt Canberra’s own citizen scientist Stuart Harris will visit the exhibition, as he’s a big fan (after he identified the unknown species in Namadgi National Park he spent over 150 hours searching for it over two-and-a-half years before it was scientifically classified as Maratus harrisi).
The region surrounding Canberra is a goldmine for these tiny wonders. Harris has subsequently found or catalogued other species nearby, including on the slopes of Black Mountain and among the vines at the Mount Majura Vineyard (where he discovered the Maratus hesperus).
The Spiders of Paradise exhibition comes with a public program including an opening artist talk with Cardoso, children’s dance workshops, a performance and movement lab with Canberra youth dance company Quantum Leap, and a Science Week film screening and talk with local citizen scientist Stuart Harris.
Maria Fernanda Cardoso: Spiders of Paradise opens at CMAG on 29 May. For more info, visit cmag.com.au/exhibitions/maria-fernanda-cardoso-spiders-of-paradise
