Butterflies and their wings own a strong symbolic power. Butterflies images and evocations are found in every culture. Symbols of beauty and liberty, butterflies have always been a source of inspiration for artists, painters, designers, film directors, but also writers and novelists, as Vita Sackville witnesses:
“Their cart had been escorted by flocks of butterflies, white and yellow, which danced all around them, now flying ahead in a concerted movement, now returning to accompany them, amused as it were to restrain their swift frivolity… She remembered thinking that this was something like her own life … moving into a cloud of butterflies which were her own irreverent, irrelevant thoughts…But, perversely, the flittering of the butterflies had always remained more important.”

 

In addition to the butterflies ‘emotional power another perspective deserve consideration that may be labeled as a specific script produced by the caprices of Nature. This potential graphic writing reminds us of very ancient divinatory practices that tried to decipher incoming events to recommend adequate course of action. It seems that signs left by burned turtle carapace were used as divination supports and are at the origin of Chinese ideograms. Today, the patterns displayed by butterfly wings are not likely to raise new divinatory practices!

However, they create a poetic resonance and an ever-present inspiration source for artists and graphic designers.

 

So Alexanor works in two directions: one towards a playful design of a new language, a new writing; another one towards a creative photography going far beyond an exact representation of a whole butterfly.
Alexanor has played with building a logical system of signs, “a sign’s syntax “while observing how dispersed signs can be organized along successive lines; and how poetic or functional rhythms and rimes can be designed within this linear framework.

In parallel, Alexanor brings her own personal and emotional vision of various wings through picking up a particular pattern, through closing up till scales covering the wings are revealed, through testing digital processes to open up new, more abstract, perceptions.

Alexanor has already exhibited several interactive artistic installations about Nature’s conservation, particularly” Empty Sea “about the threat of overfishing.

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Photos created by Alexanor come from old well-kept collections and don’t include recently captured butterflies.