Gilded II, 2026
Clare Celeste Börsch works with nineteenth-century natural history plates to explore the tension between the preciousness of the natural world and our tendency to exploit it. In this work, a swarm of leaves and blue Morpho butterflies spirals upward, evoking nature’s primordial power, which cannot be caught, contained or fully categorised. Native to Brazil, where Börsch grew up, the Morpho has become a symbol of beauty, resilience and loss: research now shows its blue dulling as forests are cleared. The swarm is laced with gold leaf, recalling how the abundance of the colonised world was transformed into wealth and carried home to Europe.
Hand-cut paper collage, papier-mâché, golden wire, imitation gold leaf.
The butterflies are printed from Hippolyte Lucas’s Histoire naturelle des lépidoptères exotiques (Paris: Pauquet, 1835–36) and Henley Grose-Smith and William F. Kirby’s Rhopalocera Exotica (London: Gurney & Jackson, 1887–1902), sourced from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The work is built on a hand-formed papier-mâché base, covered in hand-cut paper collage sculpted into a swirling swarm, and gilded.