Vanitas
“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think." Marcus Aurelius
Vanitas was made during a period of emotional and psychological fragility. At the time, I was negotiating the boundaries of mental wellbeing, aware of how easily stability could slip. The work emerged not from certainty or optimism, but from a need to remain present and grounded.
Butterflies are often read as symbols of hope or transformation, but that interpretation felt distant to my lived experience. Instead, I was drawn to their material fragility, their vulnerability to damage, their dependence on careful handling, and the ease with which they can be lost. Working with such delicate specimens required sustained attentiveness, patience, and restraint. The act of making became a way of regulating attention, creating order, and sustaining myself through process rather than promise.
Historically, vanitas imagery confronts the viewer with impermanence, reminding us of mortality and the brevity of human existence. When this work was made, that awareness was not abstract. It followed a significant rupture in my life, an event that fundamentally altered my understanding of time, expectation, and the future.
The idea that life is short was no longer philosophical, but immediate and inescapable.
What followed was not a process of resolution, but of adjustment. I was forced to reckon with permanence, limitation, and uncertainty, and with the knowledge that some realities cannot be repaired or outgrown. The work does not attempt to narrate this experience, but it carries the conditions under which it was made.
There is an unresolved tension between how the Vanitas works appear and the period from which they emerged. Many of the pieces are visually delicate or ornate; butterflies arranged as musical notation, autumn leaves, and other forms commonly associated with beauty or harmony like the very butterflies themselves. Yet they were produced during a time of personal darkness. Without context, their surfaces can read as calm or purely aesthetic, giving little indication of the emotional conditions that shaped them. This contrast reflects how difficulty often remains unseen.
With time, my relationship to the work has shifted. In more stable moments and particularly in moments of happiness, I am able to see the Vanitas series in a fuller, more cyclical way. What once felt like an unrelenting confrontation with loss now also reads as a reminder of urgency: that life is finite, and therefore demands attention. In these moments, the work aligns more closely with the traditional function of vanitas imagery not as a warning to withdraw, but as an invitation to remain engaged, present, and receptive to the briefness of being alive.
Vanitas ultimately holds both positions. It emerges from fragility, but it also gestures, unevenly and without certainty, towards an insistence on living.
Time Flies
Time pieces are a common element of traditional Vanitas artwork. Time Flies exists as a real framed artwork made solely from real butterflies and a clock mechanism . This is a time lapse video of the passing of 24 hours.