LA CAÑADA FLINTRIDGE, CA.- The historic Boddy House at Descanso Gardens hosts an exhibition exploring communication beyond the human. Journal of Therolinguistics features works by eight international artists examining translation across species—mammals, insects, plants, and fungi—as acts of ecological curiosity, care, and kinship.

The exhibition takes its name from “therolinguistics,” a fictional field coined by author and California native Ursula K. Le Guin in 1974 to describe the study of languages beyond the human. Her provocation remains timely: rather than interpreting the natural world through human rules and limitations, what might it mean to listen, learn, and encounter other species on their own terms?

Throughout the Boddy House, visitors encounter multisensory installations that translate interspecies communication into sound, image, and participation. Birdsong becomes vibrant multicolor scores. Plant signaling emerges through layered sound harmonies. Lichen suggests grammar systems shaped by time and coexistence. Additional works explore the narratives of beaver-shaped environments, bat and flower pollination role-play, and hidden messages embedded in Amazonian trees or beetle-carved branches from Swiss forests.

Featured artists include Aistė Ambrazevičiūtė, Alice Bucknell, Lucio Arese, Marianne Hoffmeister Castro, Nicole Brugger, Audax M. Gawler, Pri Bertucci and Paige Emery. Their research-based practices span sound, game design, typography, installation, and participatory formats.

“Journal of Therolinguistics invites visitors to step outside human-centered forms of communication and consider how meaning moves through the living world,” said Oscar Salguero, curator of the exhibition. “By attuning to the ways plants, animals, and ecosystems transmit messages, the artists explore new modes of thinking about connection, care, and coexistence.”

At once speculative and grounded, the exhibition blends scientific inquiry with artistic imagination. The intimate, domestic scale of the Boddy House reinforces the exhibition’s premise that communication across species is not abstract or distant but embedded in everyday environments and lived experience.

Journal of Therolinguistics continues Descanso Gardens’ commitment to presenting contemporary art that engages with ecology, landscape, and the natural sciences. The exhibition encourages slow looking and deep listening, inviting visitors to reconsider how attention itself can become a form of relationship.