Night Bloomers

Night Bloomers is a multi-sensory installation commissioned for Nocturne Festival (Halifax, NS) that engages humans and non-humans alike, inviting nocturnal beings to come closer through light, scent, and ritual.

At the heart of the installation are three sculptural beacons that act both as vessels and lures. The first beacon contains a variety of pollinator flowers that were kept in controlled conditions and trained to be “awake” during the festival, inverting their natural cycles. The second beacon is a collaboration between Simmons and Norwegian olfactory artist Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel who created a custom scent inspired by the pitcher plant, a carnivorous plant that lures in prey with a sweet scent. The third beacon is a basin from which viewers can feel thousands of local wildflower seeds and take a pinch of seeds away with them.

The piece draws on more-than-human ways of sensing, intimacy of nighttime ecosystems, and the unique environment of the one-night-festival where patterns of attention are different from normal. Visitors are invited to move slowly through the space, attuning themselves to the pace of life in the darkness while being drawn into each bright beacon, like a moth to the light or a fly to a carnivorous plant, both playful and dangerous. Just as pollinators respond to certain frequencies of scent or flower shape, the installation invites humans to engage their attention in non-linear, intuitive ways, such as scent memory and sensory curiosity.

Night Bloomers is also a meditation on our current ecological precarity. Night pollinating insects are widely under threat due to habitat destruction, light pollution, and climate change. By drawing attention to these fragile ecologies, this work aims to illuminate the interdependence of all living beings, and on the need to preserve what we do not always see.