La Mariposa (Butterfly Woman) 

Curated by Becca Pelly-Fry

Bea Bonafini, Adam Dix, Serena Korda, Rithika Merchant, Claire Morgan, Anna Perach, Candida Powell-Williams, Zayn Qahtani, Qian Qian, Jakob Rowlinson, Nooka Shepherd and Maddalena Zadra

12th of February - 15th of March

“She hops on one foot and then the other. She waves her feather fan to and fro. She is The Butterfly arrived to strengthen the weak. She is that which most think of as not strong: age, the butterfly, the feminine”

Clarissa Pinkola Estes Women Who Run with the Wolves: Contacting the power of the wild woman (2008, Rider)

La Mariposa is every woman; she is Mother Earth, Pachamama and Gaia, she is the rivers and the seas, she is intuition and magic, she nurtures, destroys and creates life all at once. She doesn’t conform to modern, White, Western ideas of beauty. She is of the earth, the water and the sky. She encompasses the entire cosmos, and her hips are wide enough to birth all the life in the Universe.

Taken from Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ iconic book, Women Who Run With The Wolves (2008, Rider), the title refers to a story about a Native American woman who is known for her transformative dance. People travel from across America to witness her famous dance, bringing with them all sorts of preconceptions and expectations about who she might be, what she might look like and how she will dance. She confounds them all; she is old, her hips are wide and her grey hair reaches the ground. She wears a pair of fairy wings, like a child would wear to a party. She waves a feather and sprinkles everyone in the audience with her magic, gently and subtly transforming them all as she dances.

I was captivated by this story as it spoke to me of female power, and how it exists in the everyday. It is not necessarily grand or spectacular, ritualised or aestheticised (although of course it can be all of those things too). Female power exists within the body, the joy of the flesh and the expression of the wild spirit. We have become quite detached from our own bodies, and therefore from our infinite and eternal souls - our connection to one another and the land we live upon. The story of La Mariposa encourages us to look for magic in the everyday.

In turn, this exhibition calls for a reclamation of the divine feminine. Every one of us was born of Butterfly Woman; we are OF her and we ARE her. The artists in the exhibition know that rekindling our relationship with Mother Earth and all living beings will support our collective healing as we face into the various social, economic and ecological crises of our time. Through re-imagining mythological tales and folkloric rituals, re-framing them within feminist, queer, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist perspectives, the artists reclaim agency for themselves and all those demonised, marginalised and erased from the dominant stories of human history. They embrace La Mariposa and make her the symbol of their imagined futures.

Here and now, we call forth La Mariposa as a balm for these troubled and chaotic times. Through her, we build new worlds founded on care, interconnectivity and mystical power.

Words by Becca Pelly-Fry