Spiders of Paradise

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the “Spiders of Paradise” exhibition at the Canberra Museum and Gallery. This is a small collection of photographs and video by the artist Maria Fernanda Cardoso. The exhibition is about the Maratus (Wikipedia link) genus of spiders. They are commonly known as “peacock spiders”, because the males are brightly coloured and dance to attract the females (who are brown). These spiders are very small: typically about 3 – 4 millimetres. But the artist has taken very zoomed-in photographs and printed them on a large scale, so that the spiders appear to be over a metre tall and looking directly at the viewer, often with two visible pairs of intensely green or purple eyes. When I stepped into one of the exhibition rooms, I had an impression of what it could be like to be surrounded by a group of curious but hard-to-read aliens. In an interview, the artist talked about her goal of bringing tiny and hard-to-notice creatures into a scale that humans can relate to.…