Category: Butterflies Ex.4

Botanic Gardens – Group Project

‘botanic movement’

After going around the Botanic Gardens, we looked at different ideas that are key to the Lichen walk. We made a plan of what we might show on the walk, creating a lined path where we walked in the style of Trisha Brown. The group used different parts of our bodies and different mediums to create the notional drawing. We saw a lot of colour from the lichens and trees which both feature in the drawing. Below you can see us creating the drawing and the route we took in the Botanic’s.

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The Kallima – Group Project

As a group we choose the Kallima, due its interesting pattern and colours, we thought about how we could manipulate this and use it to inspire our own work.  Work below is from Danish Razwi, Sally Dawson, and Rona Bisset.

Notional Kallima

Using a range of notional drawings to complete this exercise, we thought if we used our own style and artists that we have looked at then combine our ideas together it would create a clear story of the Kallima. Sally Dawson choose to look at John Cage, mapping out where the Kallima travels.  Whilst I looked at Trisha Brown, using my mouth the create the shape of the Kallima, filling it in with leaves. Danish Razwi looked at the structure and colours of the butterfly. I overlayed and played with a few settings on photoshop to create a notional drawing in different artists’ styles whilst betraying the Kallima’s beauty.

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Goddess Kallima

Thinking about how the Kallima camouflages, we decided as a group to do a dress in the style of a Kallima, looking closely at the leaf structure and how delicate the Kallima is. Choosing a physical model to represent this we created a ball gown style dress with a corset at the top with flowing sticks down to the dress. A green leaf links the corset to the skirt making it open and flowy just like the butterfly when in motion.  We also wanted to create spiderwebs to create a natural environment for the dress, using a glue gun to create white lines flowing around the dress. When picking the leaves we wanted to use mainly brown leaves with a little bit of colour from the yellow and green leaves.  This relates to the work I have been looking at from the past weeks from using natural materials to create artwork then to looking at how butterflies move and develop.

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Mimetic Species Catalogue

Mimetic species look like another object to protect themselves from predators.

Top Row – Kallima

Known as the Oakleaf butterfly, as it takes the colour of an Oaktree so becomes incredibly difficult for birds to catch them. There are around 8-10 species known due to them being camouflage it can be difficult to capture them. Kallima Inachus is the species I’m interested in as the patterns vary from different butterflies, especially in the dry season. With little sunlight in the rainforest, they normally hold their wings half-open, resting on trees or on the floor next to leaf litter.

 

Middle row – Symbiotic Lichen

It is between fungus and algae, using carbon as its food source. Lichen is grown amongst branches of trees/plants but can also live on the ground in the right conditions. I find Lichen to be very interesting as there are many shapes, some being quite flat whilst others are hair-like. Creating little pockets of detail on the trees. The colours are vivid greens and oranges depending on the type of lichen creating very abstract photographs.

 

Bottom Row – Phylliidae

Is also a very camouflaged animal, being a walking leaf insects they’re normally green. With females being larger than males, males have small forewings. Their lives are based on leaves, giving them coverage, protection and a place for their young to feed to become strong. Using leaf mimicry as a defence to protect from predators but also using sounds to ward off predators by rubbing tubercles together.