[Fall 2025]
Pure Beads of Life
by Sara Angelucci
[EXCERPT]
“Moths that fly by day are not properly to be
called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense
of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which
the commonest yellow underwing asleep in the
shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us.”
— Virginia Woolf, “The Death of the Moth”
One day in 1941, Virginia Woolf watched a moth as it fluttered, at first merrily, then frantically, against a window pane. Its movements slowed over time as Woolf went about her work, glancing up from her desk from time to time. Eventually, the moth fell from its tiny ledge, flailing helplessly upside down at first, and then, with heroic effort, twisting itself back over in one final act of being, before giving in to its own demise. Woolf’s short essay, written within a few months before her suicide, is a brief, harrowing observation of life and death. Yet more than a chronicle of the last moments of a living thing, it is a plea to pay attention not just to the sparks that catch our eye, the fireworks and glinting mirrors, but to the small details we might normally overlook, the things we walk over and past every day without the slightest notice, the tiny pockets of evanescent aliveness that surround us all the time. And not only to pay attention to them, but to marvel at what Woolf called these “pure beads of life.”
[…]
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 130 – PLANTS AND GARDENS ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Pure Beads of Life]
Sara Angelucci is a Toronto-based artist working with images and in audio. She draws on the history of photography and from natural and social issues, paying particular attention to the historical conditions of women’s labour. A graduate of both the University of Guelph and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, she has exhibited across Canada, including Le Mois de la Photo in Montreal and VU in Quebec City, and has had solo exhibitions in Europe, China, and the United States. She is an instructor in photography at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery. www.sara-angelucci.ca
Sara Knelman is a writer, curator, and educator. She has held executive and curatorial positions at major galleries, including curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, and was publisher of C Magazine. In her recent book Lady Readers (Ottoby Press, 2024), she explores her collection of found photographs of women reading. She has written about contemporary art and photography for 1000 Words, Aperture, Canadian Art, Frieze, Prefix Photo, and Source: The Photographic Review, and contributed to numerous books. She lives in Toronto.