The Metamorphosis installation transforms thousands of folded paper butterflies into a fragile outdoor field where memory, time, and loss accumulate in space. Exposed to wind, light, and weather, the work treats material vulnerability not as failure but as witness.
metamorphosis
Metamorphosis (Personal Elegies)
In-Situ Installation
2020
2,444 origami butterflies on wire stems
Outdoor site installation
Installed across open ground, Metamorphosis arranges 2,444 folded paper butterflies into a fragile field marking the passage of lived time. Each butterfly represents one week, translating personal duration into spatial form.
Seen collectively, the butterflies form a shifting landscape of fragile gestures. Wind lifts their wings, sunlight bleaches the paper, and rain stains the surface. These transformations are not damage but continuation. The installation does not attempt to preserve memory; it witnesses it.
Kaleidoscope – Installation Film
Stephen Russell-Brett
Metamorphosis (Personal Elegies), 2020
Digital video
Duration: 4 min 04 sec
Edition: 1/1
This film documents the unfolding of the butterfly field and reflects on the installation’s relationship to memory, ritual, and transformation. The movement of air through the field activates the folded forms, allowing the installation to shift between stillness and motion.
metamorphosis
Metamorphosis (Personal Elegies)
Installation View
2020
Outdoor installation with 2,444 origami butterflies
metamorphosis
Metamorphosis (Personal Elegies)
Installation View – Detail
2020
Folded paper butterflies arranged across open ground
FILM STUDIES
These experimental films reinterpret the installation through abstraction, fragmentation, and macro observation.
Fragmented Identity
Stephen Russell-Brett
Metamorphosis (Personal Elegies), 2020
Digital video
Duration: 2 min 30 sec
Edition: 1/1
Fragmented Identity reinterprets the Metamorphosis installation through experimental video techniques, including progressive saturation and desaturation, colour blooming, and fragmented visual sequences. The film explores what might be described as a “reversed metamorphosis,” where butterflies appear to unmake themselves, folding backwards through time.
Lingering Thoughts
Stephen Russell-Brett
Metamorphosis (Personal Elegies), 2020
Digital video
Duration: 4 min 05 sec
Edition: 1/1
Lingering Thoughts approaches the Metamorphosis installation through intimate macro observation. Rather than capturing the collective field of butterflies, the camera moves slowly across individual forms, revealing the material surfaces of folded paper as if they were landscapes.
PROCESS & INSTALLATION DOCUMENTATION
These film studies extend the visual language of the installation, isolating fragments of the butterfly field and translating the gestures of folding into moving image.
Installation Video
Stephen Russell-Brett
Metamorphosis (Personal Elegies), 2020
Digital video
Duration: 2 min 07 sec
Edition: 1/1
Installation footage shows translation from intimate studio practice to public memorial space. Wire stakes placed. Butterflies attached. The geometric pattern emerging gradually across grass. What begins as abstract plan becomes embodied experience – a field you can walk through, stand within, witness transforming under wind and light.
Highlights
Stephen Russell-Brett
Metamorphosis (Personal Elegies), 2020
Digital video
Duration: 4 min 27 sec
Edition: 1/1
Behind-the-scenes footage and interview captured on installation day, November 2, 2020 – the Day of the Dead. The artist speaks about the work’s development, the daily ritual of folding, the twelve emotional phases mapped through twelve butterfly designs, the mathematics of grieving made visible through 29,328 individual folds.
Project Archive
Artist Workbook
Stephen Russell-Brett
Metamorphosis (Personal Elegies), 2020
Digital video
Duration: 6 min 15 sec
Edition: 1/1
The most comprehensive process documentation, revealing the repetitive labor, the accumulated hours, the physical demands of creating, conceptualizing, experimenting, and placing 2,444 individual forms into precise geometric arrangement. The film documents making as meditation, folding as ritual, repetition as method for transforming grief into material witness.
The camera captures hands folding paper. Twelve folds per butterfly. 2,444 butterflies. Each fold is deliberate attention. Each butterfly carries time. This is the daily practice of making and experimentation then making again, that sustained me through eleven months of making. Obsessive methodology as therapeutic discipline, craft as survival mechanism, accumulation as proof of endurance through unbearable time.
Published catalogue
Stephen Russell-Brett
Metamorphosis (Personal Elegies), 2020
Author: Stephen Russell-Brett
76 pages
Published catalogue
Stephen Russell-Brett
Metamorphosis (Personal Elegies), 2020
Author: Stephen Russell-Brett
76 pages
ABOUT THE SERIES
Metamorphosis explores personal grief through repeated acts of folding. Thousands of origami butterflies accumulate into a fragile installation where memory, ritual, and time are translated into material form.
Commenced: 2020
Status: Complete
Works:
• 2,444 origami butterflies
• site installation
• installation films
• photographic works
• artist workbook
• catalogue
EXPLORE
→ Available for Acquisition: 18
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MATERIALS
Archival paper
Japanese origami techniques
Handwritten texts
Outdoor installation
Archival pigment photography
Video documentation
Metamorphosis | About the Installation
The installation of Metamorphosis transforms repeated acts of folding into a spatial field of fragile forms. Comprising 2,444 origami butterflies, each representing a week of lived time, the work accumulates into a visual archive of duration. What began as a private gesture gradually unfolded into a larger meditation on memory, ritual, and the material traces through which absence is recorded.
Paper is central to the work’s language. The folded sheet carries tension: structured yet vulnerable, deliberate yet temporary. The Japanese concept of kami links paper and spirit through shared sound, suggesting that certain materials carry symbolic weight beyond their physical presence. Within the installation, each fold becomes a small act of attention.
Arranged across open ground, the butterflies form a shifting triangular field. From above, the formation suggests two triangles that never fully resolve into a square. An incomplete geometry that reflects the fractured structure of memory itself.
Installed outdoors, the work does not seek preservation. Rain stains the paper, sunlight bleaches colour, and wind lifts the folded wings. These changes are not failures but continuations. Material fragility becomes the method through which loss is made visible.
The installation therefore functions as what I describe as documentation as elegy: an attempt to hold fleeting experiences long enough for them to be witnessed.
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.
CREDITS
Photography and videography:
Martin Short, Conrad Nel and Stephen Russell-Brett
© Stephen Russell-Brett, 2020
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