The November offerings at FELTspace feature three distinctly unique exhibitions, each one utilising humour, absurdity and hyperbole to highlight the nuances of human experience.

Like a moth to light, I am drawn into Arthropoda, a group exhibition by Tom Buckland, Sian Watson, and Emma Rani Hodges.

These artists delve into the minute lives of arthropods, a term which applies to some invertebrate insects, with each artist picking a specific insect to focus on: the moth, the mealworm, and the fruit fly.

Together, they explore human interaction with such creatures – the way they are perceived by humankind and our relationship with them – presenting allegorical metaphors that speak to our own lifecycle.

A crunching sound echoes through the space of the main gallery, emanating from a masticating Tom in his video piece ‘Tenebrio monitor (mealworm)’.

The video features the artist in a life-size costume of a mealworm, chewing on various forms of man-made plastic, from Styrofoam to a milk carton. It is a literal reference to the mealworm’s ability to digest plastic, transforming the material into organic waste.

By portraying this at an absurd and humorous scale, Tom presents us with a potential antidote to global plastic pollution, the rapid progression of which we remain wilfully ignorant.

Tom Buckland’s surprisingly cute mealworm costume

The mealworm costume featured in the video sits inside the gallery against an adjacent wall. Its beady black cardboard eyes stare blankly ahead as gallery visitors pass by. I have the unnerving sensation that the enormous creature is about to come to life and start wobbling and gyrating like it does in the video, even though the artist is standing next to me and is not inside the elaborate suit.

We often disregard insects due to their miniature nature, failing to recognise the significant role they play in the world. Sian’s video, and accompanying installation, titled ‘70% Biological, 100% Transmissible’, brings this to mind using a narrative approach.

In the video, Sian arrives at her home carrying a bag of groceries from which she pulls a bountiful haul of fruit that she places in a bowl in a quintessential Australian kitchen. The video lingers on the bowl as cut-up line drawings of fruit flies gradually appear over its contents, multiplying as the seconds tick over.

We then see Sian wearing a crown constructed of the same fruit-fly paper drawings. Wearing this crown, she is surrounded by a fruit fly swarm of her own making. Here, the artist highlights the movements and migration of fruit flies, which are carried by humans from place to place. They are with us, around us.

Both Tom and Sian’s videos are short and set on a continuous loop. The perpetual motion inherent in the looping videos accentuates the feeling of being stuck in an ongoing cycle. As viewers, the point at which we start and finish watching is irrelevant, the loop is ceaseless, insistent, and sobering upon contemplation.

We care more about ourselves than the arthropods among us, but the artists encourage us to shift this perspective by re-contextualising insect life to be more familiar. They achieve this by positioning their narratives within the domestic sphere or anthropomorphising them.

Emma Rani Hodges’ life-size moth costume ‘soft light shines on soft moth’ gives human form to the creature whilst references the artist’s cultural heritage; working with silk spun from the moth’s cocoon being part of a coming-of-age cultural practice for Thai women.

In the digitally manipulated photos of the artist wearing this moth as a cloak, pinned to the wall around the piece, the artist’s arms are outstretched, palms forward, in what feels like an act of supplication. The wings of the moth – a collage of Thai silk and found fabric stitched together with diamantes, paint, and tailor pins – become an extension of the artist’s own body.

An awareness of the artist’s body is carried through to Jazmine Deng’s exhibition, there is so much (… play, eat, rest, sleep, I can finally see you now). Crossing the threshold into this exhibition is like stepping into the personal and intimate inner life of the artist. Objects from Jazmine’s parental home are carefully positioned amongst items of refuse – an old plastic Esky, empty juice bottle, a pair of Ugg boots.

Jazmine Deng’s installation featuring Ugg boots

Jazmine’s assemblages are considered and deliberate, creating conversations between everyday objects that teeter between the mundane and animistic. It is spatial and relational. A piece of glass teeters atop a caseless pillow that is slumped against the far wall of the gallery. It is a fantastical utopia made up of un-real combinations of discrete materials, found objects, paintings, and drawings. Glitter is sprinkled throughout these assemblages, as if a by-product of their creation.

Paintings on canvas are positioned throughout the installation, but their faces are turned away to instead show us the back of the work where Jazmine has emblazoned such phrases as ‘No-one is allowed to tell me what to do’ and ‘Don’t Force’. This room is an exploration of the artist’s inner self, what lies beneath the surface, as she navigates herself as a continually changing entity within an ever-changing world.

As night begins to fall, a screen lowers over the front window of the FELTspace Gallery to project Yasemin Sabuncu’s video work, ‘I contain Multitudes’. Set against a blue screen, Yasemin’s closed caption text describes the sense of fulfilment that each ‘like’ or ‘comment’ provides – comparing the sensation to receiving a gold star sticker as a child.

She plasters these stickers onto herself one after another until her face, hair and chest are subsumed by the shiny gold stars. With a currency of gold stars, it is an exchange rate that is built upon an economic system of digital interaction and commodification of our identities. Yasemin’s text blazes across the screen: “The attention economy is shifting humanity. It’s a brave new world.”

Yasemin Sabuncu’s ‘I contain Multitudes’

It’s hyperbolic, but its sense of self-awareness is striking. The digitally mediated experience of sharing oneself with an invisible audience is alluring, as it can act as a surrogate for sociality and remedy for loneliness. It is a way of fostering connections that has been propelled by the COVID-forced isolation, but it is also something Yasemin is overly familiar with. Because of her chronic illness, she spent a great deal of time online well before the pandemic.

Yasemin seems primarily concerned with the friction between the self that is portrayed through the filtered lens of social media and her ‘true’ inner self. This is the greatest success of the work.

At the end of her performance, Yasemin removes her perfectly styled wig, stating: “I am my own work of art”.