Melbourne artist Louise Weaver weaves real and unreal, culture and nature. She makes her sculptures from the foam inner forms used by taxidermists, grafting or stitching new knitted, crocheted, and embellished ‘skins’ over them. Her animals are posed and spot lit as though in a natural-history display or diorama, with a disco twist. In Moonlight Becomes You, she presents a moonlit forest scene, containing a menagerie of crochet-covered animals, including an otter sporting a giant mirror-ball medallion and a lime-green racoon in a pair of movie-star shades. Weaver describes her hybrid animals as taking on ‘the most satisfactory attributes of many varied things in order to exist in new circumstances’.

Weaver’s title is taken from the song ‘Moonlight Becomes You’, first made a hit by Bing Crosby in 1942, and later by Frank Sinatra. However, the actual soundtrack to the work is a cacophony of noise—from the chatter of plover birds to the comedic ‘ribbit ribbit’ of frogs to the absurd Harpo Marx tune ‘Solitude’. At night things are not always as they seem. Moonlight Becomes You was commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, as part of New03.