There had been no rain in three weeks. It was unprecedented. No rain on the West coast of Scotland. In an era marked by extreme weather events, it's worth pausing to reflect on how our world has been shaped. There are few better places to do this than in the Gothic revival masterpiece of Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute, which this summer is home to new commission Moths, an installation by Monster Chetwynd.

The reason the house came to be built is instructive. The Stuarts had been a landowning noble family since the 14th century, though it was only when the 2nd Marquess transformed Cardiff Bay into one of the main ports for shipping coal that they became enormously wealthy, and then after his father died, the six-month-old 3rd Marquess became the richest person in the world. The original mansion burnt down in 1877 and the 3rd Marquess used his inheritance to commission Sir Robert Rowand Anderson – who trained with George Gilbert Scott – to design Mount Stuart House, one of the most flamboyantly excessive buildings of the nineteenth century. The house first opened to the public in 1995 and since 2001 they’ve hosted an annual visual arts programme to entice tourists to make the journey across the firth of the Clyde.



Exhibiting in such a grandiose location could easily overwhelm a meeker artist, but Monster Chetwynd is lucky enough to be both free-spirited and a descendent of aristocrats. Her current show is titled and about moths, and so it is tempting to compare Chetwynd’s evolving career and changes of name with the stages of a moth’s development:

The egg
Alalia Chetwynd, daughter of an Oscar-winning set designer and a soldier-adventurer, who studied anthropology then art, inspired by Levi Strauss’ notion of being a bricoleur who “grabs anything to hand and botches it together.”

The larva
Spartacus Chetwynd, putting on notorious happenings like An Evening with Jabba the Hutt (2003) where the slug-like Star Wars character opined on love and politics. Chetwynd dressed up friends in handmade costumes, getting them to take part in such live art plays that were both political and absurd, and saw her nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012.

The pupa
A period of consolidation under the possibly ill-advised name of Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, whose wild performances could enliven the dullest biennial.

The imago
The final stage and her current identity as Monster Chetwynd, showing installations consisting of paintings, sculptures, and performance around the world, committed to her vision of surreal playfulness that indirectly reveal the anxieties of the age.

 
Moths is spread across three locations of the Mount Stuart estate: the gardens, crypt, and main bedroom of the house. In the gardens, recycled windows are combined to build a lepidopterarium while a white door is propped against a large tree in the woods like a passage from Narnia. In the accompanying short film, the door becomes a magical portal from the house to the gardens accessed via a false doorway in a bookcase.

In the vaulted arches of the crypt, the film is surrounded by human-sized papier mâché moths in larval and winged form. A monstrous backdrop. Whereas Chetwynd has previously exhibited filmed recordings of live performances, this one was designed as a film, working with local school children and utilising deliberately-amateurish CGI to portray anthropomorphic figures flying through the air.



There is a bucolic delight in Moths. Children dressed in painted sheets wander through the woods as a solitary flute evokes the English folk music of a Renaissance fair. Although it seems like Chetwynd is retreating into an idyllic, Arcadian world, these moths aren't simple products of a fertile imagination. In the film, she interviews local experts discussing varieties of moths and how they are overshadowed by their flashier sibling, the butterfly. We learn that there are only 37 butterfly species but over 1500 different moths – such as the bright pink and yellow Elephant Hawk-moth.

In the ornate Family Bedroom, Chetwynd has affixed to the walls moths the size of eagles. They are flimsy, painted cardboard sculptures made of wire and fake fur, with no pretence of realism, celebrating playful ephemerality. In addition, small-scale paintings of moths and a couple of errant bats are modest, humble, and unprepossessing, particularly in a room with an ornate gilded ceiling and pre-Raphaelite murals.



The kind of long-term commitment it took to build Mount Stuart House now seems inconceivable. It took sixteen years before it was habitable, then another nineteen years before completion – and only then because the 3rd Marquess, its driving force, had died. Today, it seems that little in architecture, politics, or culture has the capacity to plan long-term. Climate conferences like COP26 set arbitrary future dates and red lines for change, then it is left to the invisible hand of the market.

One can’t help but compare the ephemerality of Chetwynd’s slapdash creations with the desire for eternity and eternal memory embodied in Mount Stuart. It is tempting to see Monster Chetwynd’s work as a form of escapism, perhaps to avoid thinking about long-term demands of climate change. Indeed, Chetwynd’s impatient language is appropriate for a world with shortened and shortening time horizons.

We are reminded to notice moths, and other undervalued and ignored parts of our ecological system, and not just the sensational, beautiful butterflies. This sustainable, joyful installation and point of view, with its curious lepidopterists and playful children, offers hope to those depressed by climate change through re-enchanting the natural world.