Chrysalis & Cosmos Imagery, Magic and Symbolism

Heartbeat of the Pulsar, 20 x 20 inches

Reconstruction of the Mind, 20 x 20 inches

For those of you who know my work, you know that butterfly imagery permeates my art. I love their beauty, the miraculous nature of their existence, and the expressive emergence they represent. But for my newest series Startling Truth I have been working instead with Chrysalis imagery. The cocoon encapsulates both visible outer transformations and private inner ones. There is also a darker, deeper message that for life to change, we must also change ourselves. And to undergo the kind of transformation we seek, we must surrender everything.

The two pieces pictured above are especially close to my heart. Both titles, "Heartbeat of the Pulsar" (above left) and “Reconstruction of the Mind” (above right), were taken from Adrienne Rich’s poem “Planetarium”. These artworks depict a woman tucked away in a chrysalis. She is in a state of potent metamorphosis. And, inspired by Adrienne Rich’s poem, I have tied her transformation to the imagery of both the cosmological and neurological.

Heartbeat of the Pulsar

From Earth, pulsars often look like flickering stars. On and off, on and off, they seem to blink with a regular rhythm. Although the light from the beam is steady, pulsars appear to flicker because they also spin. It's the same reason a lighthouse appears to blink when seen by a sailor on the ocean.

Pulsars aren't really stars — or at least they aren't "living" stars. Pulsars belong to a family called neutron stars that form when a star ( usually larger than our own sun) runs out of fuel in its core and collapses. This could be described as a kind of “stellar death” that sometimes creates a massive explosion called a supernova. I liken this to the kind of death to that which occurs for cocooned caterpillars before they complete their transformation and emerge as winged creatures.

Reconstruction of the Mind

The second piece (above right) is called “Reconstruction of the Mind”. In November of 2020, Alberto Feletti, a neurosurgeon at the University of Verona, and Franco Vazza, astrophysicist at the University of Bologna, published a quantitative analysis of neural and cosmic networks which drew incredible connections between the cosmic web of our visible universe and the network of neurons in our brains.

“We calculated the spectral density of both systems. This is a technique often employed in cosmology for studying the spatial distribution of galaxies. Our analysis showed that the distribution of the fluctuation within the cerebellum neuronal network on a scale from 1 micrometer to 0.1 millimeters follows the same progression of the distribution of matter in the cosmic web but, of course, on a larger scale that goes from 5 million to 500 million light-years.” — Franco Vazza

So it turns out that the human brain and the cosmos are cousins, built by an interconnected web of fractal magic. One exists in the micro and the other in the macro. ((The human brain even looks like the universe!)) This has been exciting fodder for my art making process.

Neuroplasticity has been a fascination for me for years and lies at the core of much of my artwork. We humans, like the cosmos, are in a constant state of expansion. The chrysalis image I am working with in the Startling Truth series, is just one of the ways I am addressing this part of our waking life.