This project began as my children’s school project brought the hatching of butterflies into our home and has grown into a family project that engages issues of nutrition, microclimates and global migration of all living things.
On their journey, butterflies, like children are drawn to the light of a window as their urge to expand their world becomes real. My children began asking questions about migration at a time when many of the butterflies did not survive. I began to contemplate a creative path to memorialize their journey.
Meanwhile the number of individuals forced into global migration was on the rise, with millions of families fleeing poverty, politics, natural disasters, religious freedoms and more, many of whom sought asylum at the border but were turned away.
After much experimentation, I decided to produce “photogram” prints of the butterflies with light sensitive chemistry. I hand coat the paper with platinum palladium solution, let it dry, gently lay out the butterfly parts on the solution coated paper and expose the paper to UV light. I produce these prints in sets of 100, entitled “100 Butterflies: A Prayer For Peace.” The process is meditative, reflective, and insightful.
The migration dialogue grew in our lives and the broader communities. In our home it began with the butterflies and their journey became a metaphor for life. I read books and listened to interviews with novelists, poets, spiritual leaders and scientists who spoke of the human need to move through the world. Many of these writers spoke of the paradoxes of life, of freedom and imprisonment, of perfection and deficiency, order and chaos. Migration is a timeless and necessary journey riddled with contradictions.
As of this writing our family has made three trips to visit the national butterfly center (.0rg) in Mission, Texas, a 100-acre research wildlife center and native species botanical garden on the United States side of the nearby Rio Grande River which serves as the local border separating US territory from Mexico—a line through which butterflies pass freely yet humans do not. While borders are a necessary fact of life, the distinction between movement of human and other species is arbitrary and discretionary. In the fight to create a line, we have criminalized the basic human need to migrate to safety, at times both internally and through physical space.
I continue to create the “100 Butterflies: A Prayer For Peace” prints; each set is staged in the symbolic spiral of life.
