Inspired by the artist's utopian vision or fantasy, that even while the world is being slowly engulfed by man’s greed, always disguised as need, the butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere, ultimately perhaps altering the path of the planet’s condition, returning it back to an earlier prelapsarian state when man held such destructive and ravenous impulses in check and Mother Nature was left to her own devices. The butterflies become active agents of this vision, taking hold of the AK-47 rather than simply alighting on it, their complete life process enacted on the bayonet as a declaration of the life force of Mother Nature itself. They become a statement of beauty and potency, in the face of something that
Bran Symondson portrays destruction, their numbers engulfing the AK-47 and also hinting at latent aggression and the true power of Mother Nature should it ever be fully unleashed. The work elicits a dialogue between what initially seems like quite simple oppositions, delicate wings and harsh metal, vulnerability and strength, beauty and death, nature and man, but what initially seems straightforward unravels into something more complicated.
Bullet fillings, each representing elements of the man-made world:
•1) coal(fossil fuel)
•2) dried fish(damage to the oceans)
•3) pesticide(destroying natural habitats)
•4) sugar (global over farming)
•5) sawdust (rain forest deforestation)
•6) oil (ozone, cars, harmful gases, pollution)
•7) fertiliser(destroying the natural balance through over-farming)
•8) man (the one that is responsible, greed, disguised as need)
•9) your name (a real brass blank round, the bullet that has your name on it)