wingspan (2023-ongoing)

Wingspan is an ongoing series of wearable pieces inspired by the attempt to capture butterflies in flight. At its core, the project is a meditation on what escapes us when we try to pin down something made to move.

Using brushed mohair and flight-tracking diagrams as source material for fair isle patterns, knitting becomes its own form of documentation: one that acknowledges it cannot fully capture what it seeks to record. The scientific visualizations that inform these patterns (precise trajectory maps and wing-beat analyses) represent our most rigorous attempts to quantify flight, yet the knitted translations reveal the gaps inherent in any act of translation.

Each piece attempts to hold a fragment of motion without fixing it in place. Mohair holds memory differently than other fibers because it carries the ghost of touch, the residue of movement, the way light catches differently on disturbed surfaces. The material becomes complicit in this act of translation, its inherent properties of memory and resilience echoing the persistence of flight paths long after the butterfly has moved beyond the frame.

The completed pieces function as both artifact and ongoing question: what does it mean to wear the trace of something in flight? How does the body, draped in these translated trajectories, participate in the original gesture of movement? The work suggests that our most honest attempts at documentation might be those that acknowledge their own incompleteness—that build failure and approximation into their very structure.

Wingspan operates less as representation than as parallel system, creating its own logic of motion and memory that exists alongside, rather than in service to, the flight it seeks to honor.