Throughout our lives everything about us changes; our looks, our values, our memories, all of it, right down to an atomic level. Maybe that’s one of the reasons so many are obsessed with butterflies. All over the world these bugs are symbols of transformation. Between their births and their deaths they reshape themselves into things so different it’s impossible to even recognize them as the same species. And something in us just loves that.
I like to call this painting Re-Conception because Born-Again were already taken. And besides, being re-conceived sounds like more fun than being re-born, anyway. I suspect these smears of acrylic, like all butterfly tales, are a sort of coming of age story – a sort of puberty for the soul – minus the story, of course.
The process of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly isn’t anything like most of us imagine. She doesn’t just blanket herself in a cocoon for privacy whilst she squeezes out her new wings. No it’s much more apocalyptic than that.
After she’s lived out her childhood and has grown all that she can in her old body she suddenly feels the need for a change. Instinctively she starts to ‘wander,’ looking for a place where she feels safe. Once she’s found a place conducive to her changing needs she begins to create her chrysalis, like a second womb, around her.
After she’s shielded herself from the world she begins to totally break down and deconstruct herself. If one were to crack open her shell in the middle of this process, inside they wouldn’t find who she has been, or who she will become. No caterpillar, or butterfly, or anything recognizably in between. She completely liquifies herself, leaving only some white goo. But it’s from that protoplasm that she’ll rebuild herself into something perfectly new.
The neatest part though, I think, is that scientists have recently discovered that the knowledge that she’s collected up to the moment she crawls into her cocoon as a caterpillar, she somehow holds on to through the caterpillar-stew of her metamorphoses, and gets to take with her when she flies away into adulthood as a butterfly.