Spiders of Paradise: What the Wrong Bus Stop Taught Me

Some of the best mornings are the ones that do not go to plan.

On 15 June 2026 I had coffee and a good long chat with a friend in Civic, then set off for the bus stop to head home. I waited a while before realising I was standing at the wrong stop. The right one was only five minutes away on foot, so I walked over, only to find the next bus was still half an hour off. A little deflated, I looked across the road, and there it was: the Canberra Museum and Gallery. For four years, ever since I moved to Canberra, I had told myself I really must visit CMAG one day. Four years, and I had never once found the moment. That morning, the moment found me. With half an hour to spare and nothing better to do, I crossed the road and walked in.

What I walked into was Maria Fernanda Cardoso: Spiders of Paradise, and I have not stopped thinking about it since.

The first room, with works by Maria Fernanda Cardoso.

The artist

Maria Fernanda Cardoso is a Colombian-born, Sydney-based artist who has lived and worked in Sydney since 1997. Born in Bogotá in 1963, she trained in architecture and visual arts in Colombia before earning a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture at Yale, and later a PhD in art and science at the University of Sydney. Across a career of more than three decades she has become known for turning the overlooked corners of the natural world into art, working across sculpture, installation, video, performance and photography.

Her projects have a wonderful way of taking something small and giving it centre stage. One of her most famous, the Cardoso Flea Circus, saw her spend years training live fleas to walk tightropes and pull tiny chariots, a work now held in the Tate collection. She has shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou, and represented Colombia at the Venice Biennale in 2003. As a child in Bogotá she was nicknamed la pequeña científica, the little scientist, and that curiosity runs through everything she makes.

The artist’s words on the gallery wall, and the exhibition text by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

The exhibition

Spiders of Paradise turns that same curiosity onto one of the smallest creatures imaginable. Cardoso's subject is the Australian Maratus, better known as the peacock spider. There are more than a hundred named species in the genus, and they are astonishingly tiny, commonly only a few millimetres long, smaller than a grain of rice. In many species, the males carry vividly patterned, jewel-bright flaps on their abdomens, which they raise and display in an elaborate courtship dance to win a mate. Cardoso calls them the most colourful, flamboyant, sexy and charming spiders on the planet, and standing in that gallery, I understood exactly what she meant.

Here is what stopped me in my tracks. These creatures are barely visible to the naked eye, yet Cardoso has printed their portraits at a large scale, with some images around one-and-a-half metres. The colours are not painted on. They belong to the spider itself, produced through a combination of pigment and structural colour, where microscopic structures interact with light. Enlarged like this, each abdomen reads as an abstract painting that nature composed first.

Works by Maria Fernanda Cardoso. In life each spider is about five millimetres across.

The photography

For our members, the technique behind these images is as remarkable as the subject. Cardoso worked with scientific imager Geoff Thompson and entomologist Andy Wang from the Queensland Museum, specialists in deep focus microphotography and microscopic specimen preparation. Because a lens can hold only a sliver of such a tiny subject in focus at any one time, each finished portrait is built from around 800 individual photographs, each capturing a slightly different plane of focus, then combined into a single, highly detailed image.

Anyone who has tried focus stacking a flower or a beetle in the garden will appreciate the patience this demands. Now picture doing it at microscopic scale, on a subject measured in millimetres, and you begin to grasp the achievement. Alongside the framed portraits is Cardoso's immersive video On the Origins of Art I-II, first made in 2016 and now co-owned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and Tate. Projected large, it presents the male Maratus in his complex courtship ritual, a sophisticated language of dance and vibration that ends in the display of that brilliant abdomen. Cardoso's quiet argument is that an aesthetic sense is not ours alone. It has been shaped in these creatures through evolution and sexual selection. Beauty, she suggests, is older than humanity.

What I took away

I left genuinely moved, and not only by the spiders. What struck me most was the observation at the heart of the work. To make art from a creature this small, you first have to notice it, to look where almost no one thinks to look, and then to give it the attention it deserves. That, surely, is the whole of photography in a single sentence.

And I could not ignore how I had come to be there. I had not planned this visit. It came from a missed bus, a wrong stop, and thirty minutes I would otherwise have spent staring at my phone. Four years of good intentions had never got me through that door, yet one ordinary morning gone slightly sideways did. It reminded me that the practice of seeing does not switch off when we put the camera down. If we keep our eyes open and stay a little curious about wherever we happen to be standing, the world has a way of handing us something unexpected. Sometimes it is a peacock spider the size of a grain of rice, made monumental. Sometimes it is simply the nudge to look up and pay attention.

If you go

Maria Fernanda Cardoso: Spiders of Paradise, developed and toured by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, is showing at the Canberra Museum and Gallery on the corner of London Circuit and Civic Square until 23 August 2026. Admission is free. If you have been meaning to go for four years, or even four days, do not wait for the perfect moment. Sometimes the wrong bus stop is exactly where you are meant to be.