Metamorphosis is a body of installation and photographic works exploring grief, memory, and transformation through repeated acts of folding.

Thousands of origami butterflies accumulate into fragile fields where lived time becomes material form. Through installation and image, the work traces how small gestures, repeated over time, can transform personal memory into shared structure.

Metamorphosis: | Personal Elegies

ORIGIN

2,444 origami butterflies. Each one a week of my life. Each week a fold.

Metamorphosis began as a private act of holding what could not be held.
For forty-seven years I lived in the wake of my mother’s death. The butterflies emerged slowly as a way to give that time form, one fold for each week lived in its shadow.

Twelve butterflies grouped together mark a year. The field accumulates duration. The work records grief not as a single event, but as something lived through – week by week, fold by fold.

What began as a personal gesture has gradually unfolded into a larger meditation on memory, ritual, and the fragile ways we document absence.

MATERIAL LANGUAGE

Paper is the central material of the work.

I chose origami for its vulnerability. A folded sheet holds tension: creased yet fragile, structured yet temporary. The Japanese concept of kami links paper with spirit through shared sound – a reminder that certain materials carry symbolic charge across cultures.

In Metamorphosis the butterfly becomes both object and metaphor. It carries the visual language of transformation while remaining unmistakably handmade. Each fold marks a moment of attention.

Over time the butterflies accumulate into a fragile archive of lived time.

INSTALLATION AS FIELD

The butterflies are arranged in a triangular grid across open ground.

Seen from above, the formation suggests two triangles that never quite close into a square. An incomplete geometry that mirrors the structure of memory itself. Fragmented yet recognizable as a whole.

Installed outdoors, the work is exposed to weather and time.
Rain stains the paper. Sun bleaches colour. Wind bends edges.

These transformations are not damage but continuation. The work witnesses rather than preserves.

Material fragility becomes the method through which loss is made visible.

DOCUMENTATION AS ELEGY

Metamorphosis now exists across several forms:

• the outdoor installation
• photographic works derived from the installation
• moving-image documentation
• artist books and written reflections

Each medium carries the work differently. Each records the same absence through a different register.

The project therefore functions as what I call – documentation as lament – an attempt to hold fleeting experiences long enough for them to be seen.

The butterflies do not resolve grief. They give it shape.

Metamorphosis formed the basis of my BA Honours in Visual Multimedia Arts, completed Cum Laude at UNISA in 2025. Related work from the series, Metamorphosis of Memory: Unfolding Tomorrow’s Dialogue (2024), received a Certificate of Artistic Merit from Luxembourg Art Prize 2024.

While Metamorphosis emerges from personal grief, later bodies of work expand this exploration toward broader material and ecological elegies.

Metamorphosis is part of Material Elegies – an ongoing practice investigating loss across personal and ecological scales through vulnerable materials and deliberate witness.