Memento Mori Redux: Beetle Beauty in Liquid Form

The Butterfly, or Swarm, series explores themes of transformation, fragility, and mortality through the symbolic and physical presence of butterflies suspended within water. Across cultures and histories, the butterfly has carried layered meanings-regeneration, freedom, spirituality, and death-most notably within Greek thought, where it is closely associated with the soul.

These works engage with that symbolic lineage while grounding it in direct physical process. Light shaped by the movement of water interacts with the scene to create a hyper-real yet painterly visual field, where form is refracted, dissolved, and reconstituted through wave energy. The result is an image space that feels both intimate and unstable, poised between emergence and disappearance.

Central to this body of work is the butterfly's metamorphosis: a complete and irreversible transformation that unfolds through vulnerability rather than resistance. This process becomes a metaphor for change itself-total, demanding, and transformative-inviting reflection on the ways living beings adapt to altered states of existence.

Water functions as both medium and meaning within the series. As an element capable of nurturing and destruction, it exposes the precarious balance between preservation and loss. Its transient nature underscores the temporary conditions of life, acting simultaneously as a force of renewal and erasure.

Produced entirely in-camera, the Butterfly / Swarm works form a contemplative meditation on impermanence and becoming. Within The Legacy Collection, they operate as archival records of a long-term investigation into transformation, ecology, and the delicate thresholds between life, beauty, and disappearance.

All images in this series are available as rights-managed works for editorial, institutional, and creative use.