Tim Hardy: Love Is a Crowded Theatre

Tim Hardy had been photographing the same praying mantis every Friday for six weeks when she disappeared. Her name: Dora. Her location: the Melbourne Museum. Her age: unknown. Hardy liked to visit her on his day off and had settled into a ritual of sorts, so it came as a surprise when he returned one week and she was gone. He sent three emails asking after her whereabouts. Finally, an official reply came: “While the unique individual mantis you previously photographed was removed due to it passing away, another individual has replaced it.” Like her namesake — one of Freud’s patients, a teenage girl infamously diagnosed with hysteria — she had exited her analysis abruptly. Months later, Dora reappeared in a photograph exhibited at Conners Conners’ annual emerging artist show, part of an artwork of Hardy’s titled Reliquaries. What was she doing there?