The Narrative:

Beetle / Swarm is a celebration of the unexpected grace found in the smallest of life's moments, and a testament to the profound power of nature to restore what illness quietly takes away.

This work was born from a summer afternoon suspended between grief and wonder. The artist's father was gravely ill, his world slowly contracted by Parkinson's disease—a condition that chips away not just at the body's movement but at its capacity for spontaneous joy. Then, without warning, the garden erupted. A sound like distant helicopters grew louder and closer, drawing the children out into the sunlight. What greeted them was a spectacle: a gust of beetles in full swarm, filling the air before descending upon a single tree in the garden, encasing it in shimmering, living green. In the middle of summer, the tree looked as though it had been draped in tinsel.

The father, who had spent his life sharing the wonder of the natural world with his children—catching beetles, studying caterpillars, conducting small experiments for eager young eyes—was brought outside to see. And in that moment, the roles quietly reversed. The children who had once been shown the world brought the world back to him. They caught a beetle and placed it in his hands. And there it was: light in his eyes.

Something as small as a single beetle lifted the weight of finality from the room, if only for a little while. The family breathed again. The artist never forgot it.

The beetle in this painting is rendered monumental—deliberately, defiantly large—because that is what it was. It was not a small thing. It was the thing that made her father walk a few more steps, speak a little more, and for a moment, feel the full, undiminished delight of being alive. The Swarovski crystals that adorn the composition glimmer like the tinsel of that summer tree, capturing the iridescent quality of the swarm and elevating it into something permanent. Beauty, the artist reminds us, does not require grandeur. It requires only the willingness to step outside and look.

Beetle / Swarm is also a meditation on the nature of joy under constraint, and the vital importance of noticing. Parkinson's disease erects walls around the sufferer, steadily narrowing the perimeter of the possible. Yet within those walls, joy is not extinguished—it is simply waiting to be found in a different place, at a different scale. A beetle. A tree full of tinsel. A child's open hand.

Curator’s Note:

Beetle / Swarm commands the room with an immediate sense of living energy. The jewel-encrusted beetle draws the eye with bold authority, yet it is the painting's warmth that holds the viewer. The pink background radiates a gentle, luminous softness, and the Swarovski crystals catch the light with the same iridescent shimmer as a real beetle's carapace. To spend time with this work is to be reminded that the most profound experiences of our lives often arrive without announcement—and that the smallest creatures can sometimes carry the greatest weight.