Umwelt, the world as it is experienced by a particular organism, and the environmental factors that collectively, are capable of affecting the behaviour of that animal or individual, is a German term loosely translated as ‘self-centred world’. Often the reputations of insects come about due to their perceived intrusion into the human world. We watch with awe, the complex lives of insect populations on nature programmes like Planet Earth, yet we seek to expel their presence when they make home in our clothes.

With this work, Stanners draws interest away from our own Umwelt and the inter-human conflicts located there and onto our shared environmental necessity to understand, protect and restore natural biodiversity.

In the last 27 years, global insect populations have fallen by 75%. This rapid decline poses a catastrophic and existential threat to the stability of our planetary ecosystem. A world that works for insects is one in which humans have to put aside their own short-term self-interest. Having a shared ideological purpose is what breaks down the barriers of otherness and difference.