This work was inspired by an unforgettable moment a few summers ago, standing beside a crystal-clear lake with a friend, looking up at a vast, star-scattered night sky. I’d just lost a loved one, and my friend, who is Indigenous, told me that the belief is that when a loved one dies, they become a star in the sky. They are always there, looking over us. Somehow I found this to be incredibly comforting, and in my imagination, that is our indelible connection to nature: nothing lasts, but nothing is lost; when we go, we go where all the ancestors have gone, where they wait for us to join them when our time is up.
The piece is based around the theme of “personification of nature” — while the anthropomorphic lake reflects the “river of ancestral spirits” that is the Milky Way, the fireflies are like stars in motion, moving up to join their sisters and brothers in the sky. As above, so below.