The Butterfly Effect

Now that I have dispatched my completed works to Manly Art Gallery & Museum for the forthcoming Regeneration: Contemporary Quilt Textiles 2012 exhibition (27 April - 4 June 2012), I am ready to focus on my Metamorphosis piece.  Tons of time, right?!

I've been contemplating the so-called butterfly effect.  First, there is the notion of a delicate flap of butterfly wings reverberating around the world in a hurricane crescendo.  How a short e-mail from Diane in September 2007 turned into this project, a blog, a website, a BOOK, and an international exhibition tour that has inspired  so many Friends & Followers.  Incredible!

According to Wikipedia, the butterfly effect is also "a metaphor for sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory".  In other words, the " phenomenon whereby a minor change in circumstances can cause a large change in outcome".  What if Helen had never alerted me to the presence of Diane's e-mail, which had been diverted to a spam filter account, and I have never replied yes, I want to play?!  How different my creative endeavours might have been over the past few years.

Then there's another case of synchronicity that has me wondering whether, in a Sliding Doors-esque moment,  I had left my sketches on the train in San Francisco and Kathleen Probst had found them as I slipped into an alternate universe.  Here's my sketch from late November and here's her mid-December blog post, spooky huh?!  Needless to say, I LOVE Kathleen's quilt (you can see the completed version on her website home page).

Since then, I have come up with some design ideas that have nothing to do with butterflies but I don't have anything to show you yet.  In the meantime, enjoy another Agaristidae Agricola Donovan dayflying moth that I managed to snap as it fluttered by.