‘burning butterflies’ is and audio visual work, combining the gently textured video of swaying shadows, with an almost mechanized and repetitive sound piece.

In its structure and emotions, ‘burning butterflies’ is referring to the physicality and qualities of the first machines reproducing music mechanically, the music box. Gaining widespread recognition during the Victorian era, it possesses two main characteristics. The mechanical aspect of its clockwork or hand powered mechanism, and its automated monotones melody, performed without instrumental variety, natural fluctuations or personal emphasis.

These aspects have often lent a slightly sinister fairytale quality to the output of the music box, implying the inhuman, as well as a dreamlike detachment from reality. Referring to these attributes, ‘burning butterflies’ creates and otherworldly musical arrangement of industrial rhythm patterns and a disconnected monochromatic melody, seeping thought the recurring consistency of the moving image. The screen thereby becomes a portal to an inner world, through which the spectator can project and reflect their individual suspicions, longings and dreams onto and beyond the visual and acoustic canvas of the work.

Room installation in a short hold prison cell as part of ‘Transition’, 2009 (approximately 2.5 x 1.5 x 2 meter) Exeter Castle, Exeter, UK