My Butterfly Home

Project: ‘My Butterfly Home’

Artist: Sinead McGeeney

Public Art Co-ordinator: Rina Whyte

Year of installation: 2008

Medium: Perspex

Location: Riverbank Arts Centre

About the piece: My Butterfly Home’ is a piece based on the notion of transformation. The artist Sinead Mc Geeney has created a surreal landscape of butterflies in an expansive overhead piece that runs from the front entrance of the Riverbank Arts Centre in Newbridge to the back stairway of the centre. The piece takes the form of about 100 butterfly motifs of different sizes and shapes and design, ‘flying’ through the room in one long stretch. Each piece is made from hard perspex. The idea for using the fluorescent orange material is to make the most of the unique edge properties of the sheet. The cut edges tend to illuminate with the slightest light creating a bright iridescent effect. This is to economise on the low light available in the space and at the same time highlight the overhead shapes. The material is also translucent, so the light coming from the front entrance will shine through the nearby pieces. The mirror material is also introduced here to reflect light and further create the illusion of brightness. Besides maximizing the light and space available, “My Butterfly Home” is about the transformative potential of an industrious material and applying it to the space to create a unique, organic feel from the
material’s properties.