Lucy Meyle is a Tāmaki-based artist whose practice primarily explores our relationship with animals, examining and questioning the limits of human conjectures about them as a relational investigation, rather than a scientific inquiry. Predominantly working in sculpture and publication, Meyle embraces the absurd, gathering and assembling archives, found objects, drawing, and casting into material relation.  

In her current solo exhibition in The Changing Room at Gus Fisher Gallery, Phone Tree, Meyle has turned her interest in human and animal relationships to moths – reframing moth traps as holders of moth narratives, as inadvertent collectors capturing moth memory, drama, and dreams. 

In Phone Tree, Meyle presents five moth ‘situations’, each embodying a different kind of moth and reimagining its trap into a new form reflecting its potential experience, memory, or navigation of the world as a moth – an act of anthropocentric guesswork of their interiority. Enveloping these situations are large scale ‘drawings’ on the walls made of this moth-eaten looking tissue paper, layered, collaged, and hole-punched, creating this playful exploration of scale within the space. 

Imagining the interior lives of moths in such detail, Meyle has turned these moth traps, as devices of surveillance and control, into portals of reconsideration of our relationships with them, reorienting our preexisting ideas of the lives and world of moths. 

Sof had a kōrero with Lucy Meyle about Phone Tree and her overall practice.