Metamorphosis is a monumental investigation of grief’s architecture – 2,444 hand-folded origami butterflies created over eleven months in 2020, each representing one week of my life, organised into twelve distinct designs mapping specific emotional phases of loss. This is systematic taxonomy rather than decorative memorial: each design corresponds to a grief stage, each butterfly within that phase carrying unique material and symbolic properties.

The project emerged from writing a letter to my deceased mother. That single gesture – correspondence across unbridgeable distance – sparked recognition that grief is not singular emotion but complex progression requiring its own visual vocabulary. I developed twelve designs encoding specific experiences: burned edges for anger’s violence, kiss marks for longing’s accumulation, my mother’s photograph printed on vellum for loss that simultaneously appears and disappears, sequinned flowers for tentative healing, unbroken circles for final acceptance.

Each butterfly required twelve precise folds. The complete work represents 29,328 individual gestures – testament to sustained discipline as healing practice. This obsessive methodology became therapeutic: repetitive craft as daily ritual, making as survival mechanism, accumulation as proof of endurance through unbearable time.

The installation’s spatial arrangement enacts its conceptual framework: butterflies positioned in a rectangle bisected by a diagonal pathway, creating two triangles that never meet yet forever form a square. This geometry literalises the relationship between living and dead – absolute separation, eternal connection. Viewers walk through this threshold, inhabiting the space between presence and absence.

When installed outdoors, wind animates the butterflies. They cast shadows, catch light, flutter despite being anchored – static objects transformed into kinetic presence. This environmental collaboration matters: grief, like these paper forms, moves through us whether we will it or not.

First installed on November 2, 2020 (Day of the Dead), the work has been exhibited, photographed, and filmed, creating a multimedia ecosystem investigating how meaning shifts across media. The installation earned BA Honours Cum Laude from UNISA in 2025 and has been recognised internationally, including a Certificate of Artistic Merit from Luxembourg Art Prize 2024 for related diptych work Metamorphosis of Memory: Unfolding Tomorrow’s Dialogue (2024).

Metamorphosis asks whether systematic methodology can contain chaotic emotion, whether obsessive repetition heals trauma or merely defers it, whether personal loss can expand into universal language without losing specificity. The work doesn’t resolve these tensions but holds them in productive suspension – 2,444 fragile paper forms bearing witness to what cannot be fixed, only transformed.

Metamorphosis

(Published Catalogue, 2020)
Author: Stephen Russell-Brett | 76 pages

LINGERING THOUGHTS

Metamorphosis. 2020.
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HIGHLIGHTS

Metamorphosis. 2020.
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