Maratus volans, male number 2, Redhead Lagoon, 1 September 2014

SPIDERS OF PARADISE

‘I love working at the edge of perception. What fascinates me about the small is that it’s even more complex than the big.’ María Fernanda Cardoso

María Fernanda Cardoso has been working innovatively with animals and the natural world for almost four decades. Her fascination is powered by a profound regard for the beauty and sophistication of nature and our place within it, as well as a desire to explore and represent behaviours and phenomena that support her ideas of art, culture, aesthetics, performance and, essentially, the drive to make art.

Cardoso’s passion for the natural world was sparked in childhood as she explored the lush wetlands around her home in Bogotá, Colombia. In pre-Colombian Indigenous cultures, animals were both abundant and sacred. As a young artist, she was interested in how human cultures revered certain creatures and she incorporated the dried forms of lizards, snakes, frogs, grasshoppers and flies into her poetic, pared-back sculptures and installations of the 1990s.

In 1994 Cardoso moved to San Francisco where she began exploring making art with living creatures – fleas. Her internationally acclaimed Cardoso Flea Circus starred ‘Professor Cardoso’ and a troupe of cat fleas that performed incredible feats, such as weight lifting, tightrope walks, high dives, trapeze and tango-dancing in an intricate, miniature circus arena. The tiny performers were filmed using a high-powered camera that magnified their acts and projected simultaneously onto screens for the audience. The Cardoso Flea Circus was first presented in 1994 and toured until 2000. With this, Cardoso had revived a lost art form – the widely popular flea circuses of the 1800s – and transformed it into a contemporary art performance. The Cardoso Flea Circus involved years of intense work and observation to learn techniques that harnessed the fleas’ innate behaviours. Her research revealed fresh perspectives on the species, their anatomy and the power of their drive for survival.

Cardoso now lives and works in Sydney, Australia. The artist’s commitment to aesthetics, sensory perception and the natural world has diversified with numerous endemic species to delve into. Her extraordinary Museum of Copulatory Organs (MoCO) presented in the 2012 Biennale of Sydney was the subject of her Doctoral thesis that explored the uniqueness and complexity of the reproductive organs in various invertebrates. Exquisitely carved sculptural forms of penises of Tasmanian spiders, and observations of hundreds of other creatures, were presented and sensitively illuminated in tall display cases. Cardoso’s MoCO was both wondrous and scientifically compelling; it experimented with traditional natural history displays and very new technologies, with the artist’s hand, mind and eye ever present across more than 450 individual items.

From this, the artist’s recent, ongoing project starring tiny Australian jumping spiders, the Maratus, or ‘peacock spiders’ had its beginnings in 2014.

Of her subject, Cardoso says: ‘The Maratus spiders of Australia are the most colourful, flamboyant, sexy, and charming spiders on the planet… To me, their use of colour, gesture, sound and movement makes them (…) sophisticated visual and performing artists... They are also the smallest performers I know of—on average about 1/8 inch in size, smaller than a grain of rice.’

In fact, they are so tiny, they’re almost imperceptible. Cardoso is fascinated by the courting behaviour of the male Maratus – his canny movements, patterning and iridescent colour, his use of sound and scent to seduce a female. He seeks eye contact – he has eight eyes – and signals gracefully by lifting his legs and waving, swaying and tapping to impress her with his artful dance and beat. She, for her part, exercises her right to choose. The pièce de résistance is the display of his colourful abdominal flaps, opening like a peacock’s tail. The Maratus are highly visual beings, just like humans. Cardoso says they are aware of their looks and the impact this awareness has on the other’s reactions. They are deliberate in their use of gesture, form, colour, and pattern.

Cardoso typically works for many years on her investigations, and collaborates with cinematographers, scientists, museologists, 3D modellers and technicians. For this series of exquisite pigment prints, Spiders of Paradise (2018-ongoing), Actual Size and Eye Contact (2016-ongoing), the artist collaborated with renowned scientific imager Geoff Thompson who specialises in deep focus microscopy at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, Australia. This technology allows for great depth of focus with extreme levels of magnification by focus stacking hundreds of photographs into one single, sharp image. Usually at least two of these focus-stacked images are combined in Photoshop to produce the final composite image, which often is combined from over a thousand photographs. The result is a magnificent and detailed photograph, where every scale and hair structure on the Maratus’ abdomen is magnified and acutely visible. The images reveal the ‘composition' of each ‘artist spider’s' particular, colourful pattern – his individual scales are a different colour, and his patterned abdomen creates a unique, vibrant composition in itself.

To this interdisciplinary collaboration of art, biology and micro technology, Cardoso contributes an artist’s perspective with characteristic passion, imagination and aesthetic rigour. The series confirms her conviction that an aesthetic sense – and not only in humankind – is developed through the forces of evolution and sexual selection. Art, and everything that is beautiful, extravagant and original is often the result of the need for desire, attraction and, ultimately, reproduction.