Lost (after Donald Rodney, In the House of my Father, 1996-7)

Ethically sourced butterfly wing fragments. Our fragile home - a web of associations. In 2022 I was invited to create a new piece for Insect Odyssey at Salisbury Museum. Each invited artist was given a vintage entomological publication as the starting point, or actual material, for a piece of work. Mine was a book on British Butterflies. Many of the butterflies listed were already threatened at the time of the book's publication, some species continue to make their perilous journeys across sea and land, as are many human refugees today. I revisited recurring themes in my work and thinking about how fluid meaning and ideas can be. All things change, all things stay the same. In the sculpture 'In the House of My Father' Donald Rodney used his own skin to speak of his inherited disease. I first saw it in 2015, when news of Syrian war refugees was reaching us. Images of waves of desperate people fleeing their homes - setting up fragile settlements in unfriendly territories. This piece spoke to me of personal and universal vulnerabilities and atrocities, and of ecological disaster. The fragile beauty of butterflies, and their resilience to migrate thousands of miles, became the inspiration and material for the fragile tiny home 'Lost' exhibited in Insect Odyssey (2022). A metaphor for the fragility of all life, the ecological and humanitarian crises that we have created and must face. I was invited by the Royal Entomological Society to give a presentation about this piece and it's wider associations at the Natural History Museum, London on June 13 2023.