Grow Op is an annual immersive art and design festival at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto, transforming the historic hotel into a temporary landscape of installation art, ecology, design, and imagination. The 2018 edition, After the Flood, explored themes of environmental change, transformation, adaptation, and survival through site-specific installations that invited both reflection and physical experience.
Like moths drawn to a flame, we are often pulled toward destructive behaviors—shaped both by personal coping mechanisms and by the dangerous ideologies society teaches us to desire.
So much of the self is invested in completing a life cycle: survival, love, nourishment, protection, and the hope of continuity for future generations. Like the moth, we move through constant states of transformation, searching for safety while sometimes being drawn toward what may harm us.
Research suggests that even moths have evolved in response to their fatal attraction to light. This raises an urgent question: can we evolve as well? Can we recognize and interrupt our own self-destructive patterns, both as individuals and as societies?
In this suspended fiber installation, I created a handmade cocoon—a fragile yet protective space for rest, reflection, and pause. The work invites viewers to enter a moment of stillness and consider the tension between need and desire, instinct and choice, destruction and transformation.