Grammodes Geometrica

Image from painting by artist MightyYellow

I was having dinner last night with the artist who made the image in Photo 2 for the upcoming ampuletsX7 exquisite corpse project. She was assigned the butterfly “Painted Jezebel” as a theme. Towards the end of dinner she pointed out “hey, a moth” outside the window behind us. ⁣⁣
Insects love my flat because almost all the windows are constantly kept wide open and the breeze carries them in, coupled with the smell of plants, flowers and earth. At night, there is also the draw of the single moody light in the otherwise dark flat. I give this explanation in case some of you are already leaping into non-scientific plots. ⁣

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Later that evening as I was doing the dishes, this Grammodes Geometrica (what a cool name right!?) landed on the pile of rubbish from the washing up. It made me remember my own companion image (see below) for this project of the painted jezebel. 


Butterflies and moths are these beautiful winged things we accord all kinds of meaning and value to. When I first read about butterflies as a teenager (I have a literature student’s crush on Nabokov, oh Nabokov! And he was butterfly mad), this one fact about them stuck with me: they feed on decaying matter. For all the nostalgic, romantic and pretty connotations we have dreamt up for the butterfly (and less so for the clothes-destroying death-heralding moth), you wouldn’t imagine the butterfly or moth on a corpse or, in my case, a pile of rubbish. Yet it is there that they feast and get drunk on a different nectar. ⁣
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We all secretly enjoy these coincidences and chance meetings, don’t we? They allow us to see patterns and make meaning - and therefore weave structure into our lives.

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