So, first of all, thank you so much. Would you be able to say your name and what you do?
Yeah, my name is Lauri, my pronouns are they them, and probably in this sense I am a creative and a bug enthusiast.
Lauri Pavlovich is the artist behind the work Bugs Against the Binary, which was shown at Melbourne's Science Gallery.
This artwork was all about challenging conventional notions of sex, sexuality and gender using really cool bugs.
Hi, my name is Zophia. I use she her pronouns, and Lauri happens to be a friend of mine from our days at Melbourne's queer youth events.
I remember the magical experience of seeing bugs against the binary for the very first time.
You walk in and find yourself surrounded by a circle of six tanks, home to insects whose very biological existence breaks human societal conventions.
Snails who have both male and female sex organs.
Detachable penis spiders, yes, that is their real name.
Ultraviolet glowing scorpions whose enclosures resemble underground queer ballroom runways, complete with disco ball and tens across the board.
And that's just the beginning.
I tracked down Lauri to ask about the inspiration behind the work and also ask, why bugs?
So I am autistic and bugs have been a lifelong special interest for me, which my mother was very thrilled about when I would bring them home as a child.
So I kind of, when I was looking at the theme of break the binaries, I was thinking about my own gender being non-binary, but then I was also thinking about how that kind of links in to a lot of my other interests.
So I really wanted to create an exhibit that showcased all the different ways that so many different bugs do break the binaries and don't fit into the kind of gender roles and systems and kind of boxes we have within society.
A big comparison between gender and bugs that I used a lot throughout the exhibition when I was speaking to people about it was often people's immediate reaction to a spider or a bug when they see it is just to squish it because they freak out and they're like, oh, absolutely not, and they just squish it.
And a lot of the time that's just because they don't really understand kind of the benefits of bugs and how much they really, really do for our world.
I find as people start to understand bugs a lot more, they get a lot more comfortable with coexisting with them.
And I think it's really similar for trans identities. People who don't understand what it means to be trans and what goes into our identities often react with very immediate transphobia and very immediate like, no, absolutely not, that's not right, this doesn't fit in with what I've been told.
And it's kind of like squishing the spider. But then I have never met somebody who throughout being open to learning about transness has not changed their mind.
They always tend to grow and begin to understand more about empathy.
And yeah, I've got a lot of friends who and family members as well who weren't totally chill with the whole trans thing when I came out, but have grown a lot since then and are now massive allies.
So I think those two parallels between bugs and people is pretty huge.
And I found throughout the exhibition, a lot of people went in with maybe some kind of prior feelings about bugs and trans people and came out with their minds changed, which was really cool.
I loved Lauri's Living Artwork, but it wasn't enough just to see it.
I had to go deeper to really get into the guts of it.
The insect guts and where there's insect guts, there's...
Yeah, that's a big thing of poo. Like see, this is like the entire thing.
Yeah, I'll give you a shot of the next one to pull some guts out and stuff.
Let me back up for a second.
A few days before that clip you just heard, I received a very special package from Lauri.
You see, some stick insects had naturally passed away during the course of the exhibition.
And like the diehard stands who spend megabucks on locks of their idols hair, I was now holding in my hands to cryogenically preserved celebrity stick insects that had been on display in the artwork.
At least the version of cryogenic preservation that involved a takeaway container and Lauri's fridge freezer.
I am sure frozen head King Walt Disney would not have approved of this technique.
These Diva Phasmids had been seen by hundreds, maybe thousands, but probably not millions of Melbourneians and now they were in my hands.
And I was going to do the only thing with them that they deserved after such an epic life.
Make them into gay bug art for my girlfriend.
I think, I think it's mostly a poo that's a problem, so I won't pull from the upper abdomen, but I should pull from the lower abdomen.
That was Clarice. Clarice, who are you and why are you pulling out bug proofing guts?
Hi Zafia. Well, my name is Clarice Sawyer. I use she her pronouns and I'm an insect taxidermist, which means I preserve insects after death.
And to do that, you have to take out things that would normally get a bit stinky after a while inside their exoskeleton.
So Clarice and I have been friends since high school and now we're sitting together cross legged on the living room floor of her Fips Row share house, pulling out bug guts with tweezers on the coffee table.
Clarice has just signed off on the abdomens being free from poo, guts and unfertilized eggs.
And we've now moved on to arranging the legs with pins in the positions that they'll dry in.
I also have to mention that she's wearing a beautiful multicolored 70s gown as she explains all this.
So what happens once you pin the legs where you want them? What happens then?
You just dry them. And then they stay?
Yeah, yeah. So the thing is, right, the exoskeleton is made out of chitin, so there's not really much you have to do in terms of preserving it.
There's no chemicals you need to add. I mean, the only thing is that if you're storing them, especially a lot of them, you should store them with mothballs because that stops museum beetles from getting into the displays.
Yeah, that would be the only thing I say. But it's one of the easiest forms of taxidermy to be honest.
You know, it's kind of like a bit of a cop out. You know, people often like people often ask, you know, like, oh, is this really considered taxidermy?
And I'm like, well, I mean, you're preserving dead things, but it's not like it's not the whole process that, you know, taxidermy is for some other animals.
At Insect Emporium, the main preserved bugs that people like to buy are butterflies.
Clarisse brings some out now. Two large tupperware containers filled with layers on layers of them.
They look so beautiful laid out like that. There's a whole bunch of varieties all together.
The butterflies wings are closed, so their bright colors are hidden and you can only see their brownish undersides, which are called the ventral side and are used for camouflage.
Oh, so this is a Ulysses here.
Took me like opening the wings to find that out. So you see when I squeeze on this thorax, it causes the wings to open up.
And that's because like the hydraulic system that the butterflies use to open their wings is still present in death.
So it's kind of like it's like the equivalent of, you know, when people pour like soy sauce on a squid or something that's recently died.
And then the tentacles like move. But not really, because that's a nervous system.
And this is hydraulics. It's kind of freaky how you can manipulate the body in the same way in which it moves in real life.
And yes, sometimes like in the hot water, the proboscis actually kind of unrolls a bit.
So if you want, you can actually unroll the proboscis so it's like long and pointy, which I've done before for
Darwin or Wallace's Hawkmoth. I can't remember what it's called.
I think it's called Wallace's Hawkmoth, which has the longest proboscis in the world.
And that's like an example of, it's an example of like, I think it's like it's like co-evolution, co-evolution.
I should know that. Yeah.
Clarice is talking here about something called diffuse or gilled co-evolution.
When a bunch of species of flowering plants evolve to start offering up their nectar at the end of a long tube,
a bunch of species of insects will co-evolve to have a really long, thin mouth to get to that nectar.
Charles Darwin was once presented with an extraordinarily long nectar tube on an orchid from Madagascar,
a full 30 centimetres long. Upon receiving it, he exclaimed in a letter to a friend,
Good heavens, what insect can suck it?
The insect that could suck it wouldn't be found until after Darwin's death.
A Madagascan hawkmoth with a tongue so long it could reach to the very bottom of the nectar tube.
The thing is as well, in death, the wings aren't fully inflated, so I'm not sure if you've ever seen a butterfly come out of a cocoon,
but when they come out of the cocoon, they've got to pump up their wings.
So likewise, it's not going to be exactly the same, you know, even though we've done our best to do stuff like rehydrate them and etc.
So when you say they pump up their wings, this is like with their hydraulic fluid system, they're putting fluid throughout the wings?
Yeah, I think so. I think so, I think that's how it works.
That is so cool.
I do need to learn more.
When a butterfly first emerges from its chrysalis, its wings are small, wet and deflated. They're no good at all for flying.
In order to expand its wings, the butterfly has to pump a fluid called meconium into them so that they can expand, after which they dry and harden.
It turns out that meconium is the metabolic waste product from the pupal stage of an insect, and I'm no entomologist,
but the fact that the first thing a butterfly does on the first day of its new life is to pump up its wings with its poo and then poo out the rest of its poo.
That's beautiful.
I think when I started pinning, I was kind of scared of like touching dead things for some reason, like I had a bit of a phobia with like,
so I would have like a lot shake your hands and what you have right now.
So you can see this is sometimes quite a haphazard process, you know?
Yeah, it's nice. I think like I, yeah, like, well, they're so self-contained, like little dried beings, like they don't, I don't know, it's very, it's not messy, the process.
No!
It doesn't have to be kind of haphazard, like it doesn't have to be like super duper.
It's not like dissecting like a mammal or something, you know, that would be a lot more, I mean gross for one thing.
Yeah, I know. Imagine if humans were like had external skeletons, you know, imagine what that would sort of be like, because we become so different after death,
but like imagine if you would still be able to sort of see someone as they were when they were alive or close to it when they were.
I mean, yeah, that would be really interesting. Like, I wonder, you know, I mean, it's difficult to tell because insects obviously are less complex creatures than us,
but I wonder if they experience any kind of uncanny valley and looking at dead insects.
Yeah, because it like, they look quite similar, like you can't see, I suppose, from the outside, like...
Many signs of decay.
Yeah, although they are, like they communicate mainly in pheromones, right?
Yeah, so I guess, yeah, I guess from that they, and also like a lack of movement, they'd be like, oh, okay.
Oh, my body.
Yeah.
My dude.
One of my favourite sci-fi books is The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers.
In this book, an alien species described as lobster centaurs have hard outer shells and are as smart and sophisticated as humans, if not more so.
The book imagines what cultural differences a species might have if they had bodies like this.
One way is that facial expressions are less important.
Another is that males carry their partner's eggs in keratin pouches in their shell until they hatch. Isn't that beautiful?
But of course, one of the most famous imaginings of humans inside insectoid bodies is Franz Kafka's short story The Metamorphosis.
The main character, Gregor Samsa, wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect, a monstrous vermin, which is often interpreted to be a cockroach.
His transformation, his new appearance, garbled speech, and new habits of crawling around the walls and ceiling cause him and his family immense distress.
And it's ultimately the cause of his demise.
The fact that this particular creature was chosen to represent a state of utter alien revulsion, I think shows the place that insects, and particularly pests, occupy in our culture.
These creatures, whose bodies are so different to ours, are at times disgusting and at others aspirational, and always a rich and beautiful part of a biodiverse ecosystem and world.
The spiny stick insects have dried, and they've been framed, and it's time to ring up Lauri and see what they think.
So I feel like first of all, I shall just show you the little artwork that we created with your bugs before I ask you to tell me about it a little bit.
So I'll show you, it's right above my head, and then I'll send you some pictures of it. Here it is.
You really did make it gay. That's the best thing ever.
Thank you.
I have positioned the bugs so they look like they're giving each other a big kiss.
Would you be able to tell me a bit about the bugs in the frame?
Yeah, so there's a spiny leaf stick insect. They are native to Australia, and the two specimens that you've got in there are both females.
The reason that I chose to include them in the exhibition is that they do not conform at all to the idea of maternal care that we have within human society.
So the way that they reproduce is they literally just drop their eggs to the forest floor and hope for the best, and they never see their babies ever.
So often keepers will not even realise that they've laid eggs because it's just laid on the floor.
They can also reproduce via hearth and oogenesis, so they don't actually need a man at all, which is pretty cool.
And yeah, when they drop their eggs to the bottom, often ants will pick them up thinking they're seeds,
and then the ant storerooms are kind of the perfect place for stick insects to hatch because they take a really long time to hatch and they provide the perfect conditions.
So not only do the mums just completely drop them to the floor and forget about them, but they make an entirely different species of insect raise their kids for them.
So besides the tarantulas that we had, the semi-social pygmy tarantulas, she is a very hands-on mum, will stay with her babies for a very, very long time, feed them, etc.
It just kind of shows a huge difference in the different maternal practices of the bug world.
They do have kind of short lifespans, so we did have a couple of deaths, but the amazing thing about that was it meant I got to dissect them and pin them and keep their beauty going even after death.
Yeah, could you tell me a little bit about that? What made you decide to pin them and dissect them and, like you say, keep their beauty going?
Yeah, so I think bugs can freak people out a lot, and I'm always keen for them to be appreciated,
and different people have varying capacities to appreciate them in different forms.
Like some people really just cannot deal with live bugs, other people really can't deal with dead ones.
So I just kind of wanted to add a bit of variety into the ways that they could be viewed and appreciated to hopefully spark a bit of a passion in some people.
And yeah, the dissection just came with the preservation process because you've got to remove their insides to make sure that they are well preserved.
And it was actually a really fascinating process and not something that I was expecting to get out of that exhibition.
So that was really awesome.
Honestly, I just hope that this podcast and project inspires more people to get more involved with bugs.
They're incredible in a lot of different ways, and I'm sure that your listeners will discover that more and more as the weeks go on.
Next week on the show, we're talking to another artist whose work collides with insects, but in a whole different way.
Thank you for joining us. See you then.
Thank you.