Butterflies

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One Butterfly Down, 16 to Go

Kathleen Griffin In Progress Leave a comment   ,

“You imagine, when you start a project like this, that one day you’re going to turn a corner, and it will all come together.”  – Kathleen Griffin

Somehow the emails from Humankind got lost in outer space the last few days so I am just finding out now, the first butterfly is out of the mold. For anyone who is just coming to the Blog, Kate Kaman and Joel Erland at Humankind are doing the butterfly fabrication in Philadelphia.

These emails mark a dividing line. The first butterfly is here, it’s only a matter of time before the rest of them come. But the first one is here. This is no longer an idea, it’s a physical reality. It’s been three and a half years since the start of this, so it’s kind of a big deal. I used to feel like each drawing I did pulled the reality of the project closer, then finally the drawings became drawings and models, then a drawing made a foam prototype, then another one, then a pattern. Then engineering drawings planned out a steel armature, then cut a steel armature. And now, well, I have a thirteen foot butterfly that can withstand winds of over 100 miles an hour. So I guess I’m entering the portion of the project where actual butterflies start pulling the project closer. Each thing, step by step.

You imagine, when you start a project like this, that one day you’re going to turn a corner, and it will all come together. That it will be unstoppable, locked down and sewn up and you will be able to just sit back, relax and enjoy it. But that isn’t at all how it actually is, it’s so many millions of tiny steps that it can feel eternal or doesn’t ever move forward in a measurable way. It’s just like when you’re in a band- first you think that if you ever get signed you will have made it, then you realize that getting signed is only the beginning. Each step in this project is one of a thousand, so when something tangible happens, it feels like a really big deal.

Today there is a butterfly, and tonight when I go to sleep it will be in a world that has one of my giant butterflies in it. And that is what I set out to do in the first place.

I wanted to live in a world where golden butterflies could appear and carry off the buildings, that the things in my head were as real as the cars I pass in the street or the letters that come in the mail.

So, the first butterfly has arrived. And yes, it is bigger than my car.


Step Two: Do a Lot of Bad Drawings

Kathleen Griffin Backstory, Blog Leave a comment  

“This piece lingers in a border space, something that is real and yet still feels like you are only seeing it and then finishing it or making it real in your head. Like a piece of poetry made real, crystallizing for a minute.”

I began drawing butterflies about six years ago. They just started popping into my head. It was strange how they would come, I knew they were an important idea for my work, but it would seem that just as I was understanding why, the idea would disappear, and I was left  with the feeling of having forgotten something important. I found myself struggling to remember the idea. So I began to draw butterflies. At that time I was still living and working in Birmingham, Ala.

A year later when I moved up to Ithaca, New York, the butterflies were still appearing.

I threw away the first year’s worth of my butterfly drawings, because they had no substance, they were just drawings of butterflies, the insect. This is the strange thing about drawing, sometimes you know you are just creating a space for an idea to grow, it becomes more of a muscular activity. I was deeply involved in other work at the time, so the butterflies were sedentary.

By the second year, it was clearer that the butterflies were about the pulling of memory. In the drawings they began pulling on things, on buildings, people and objects, tearing them down, carrying them away, lifting them up. Sometimes the drawings were dark and the butterflies destructive, other times they were a rescue or transformation. On my studio wall in pencil, I wrote “the butterflies of memory come in their outrageous beauty, they come to tear the buildings down.” I began to think about architecture and the second construction inside it, the second building, the one created from memory. The building that can linger long after the first one falls.

I started making butterfly sculptures and moquettes, but nothing I was happy with. They sort of lingered in my drawing room as piles of drawings began to build up. It was in these drawings that I worked out how the butterflies functioned conceptually, and why even now I think of this piece as much in terms of drawing as I do sculpture – in part because of the scale and visual distance created by the size and location of the piece, but also because of how the piece is meant to function visually.

This is not at all typical of my sculptural work, which is usually acutely concerned with it’s material reality and physical presence. This piece lingers in a border space, something that is real and yet still feels like you are only seeing it and then finishing it or making it real in your head. Like a piece of poetry made real, crystallizing for a minute. I think the piece will seem very unreal when it is up, the sunlight flashing and flickering on the gold, heightened by the fact that it’s temporary. You will see it and then it will be gone, and you will wonder if you imagined it. It will only continue to exist as long as it is remembered.