‘A Dark Day In Paradise’

 The Royal Pavilion, Brighton

 8 June 2010 – 16 January 2011

The installation forms part of museumaker: unlocking the creative potential of museum collections.

The Royal Pavilion is one of the most iconic buildings in the country. It was created by John Nash for the Prince Regent (later George IV): an exotic, oriental pleasure palace, its magnificent interior is a reflection of the monarch’s personality and the Regency period.

Clare Twomey has installed a swarm of 3,500 exquisitely made, black glazed ceramic butterflies in several sites in the Royal Pavilion: in the Banqueting Room; between the columns in the Great Kitchen; in the Entrance Hall; and other ground floor rooms. The butterflies are clustered on the banqueting table, across windowpanes, in roof lights, on mantelpieces and other surfaces. They are all individually finished: some with wings open, some almost completely folded in on themselves, some appearing to be in flight, others looking sedentary. Clare Twomey’s “swarm of beautiful menace” provides a “veil of mourning”, enabling visitors to reflect on this building’s past culture of hedonism, as well as inviting them to consider their own values and priorities. This project represents the first time a contemporary artist has been commissioned to create an installation for The Royal Pavilion’s interior, and has necessitated working closely with Pavilion staff, their team of conservators and a small group of student helpers from University of Brighton.

Clare Twomey explains: “I was drawn to the Royal Pavilion because of its profound beauty and excess. As I studied the interior, I noticed the icon of the butterfly. It is very temporal and, if you see one, it is for a moment – magical and frivolous. The black silhouettes of my butterflies are very graphic and stand out, because they contrast with the vibrancy of the Pavilion’s colourful interiors.”

In Antiquity the butterfly, emerging from the chrysalis, came to symbolise the soul leaving the body at death.

In Christian art the life cycle of the caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly is equated with life, death, and resurrection.

The transient beauty of the butterfly could be a metaphor for the transience of life and the vanity of earthly things. So, swarms of black butterflies, though beautiful, are menacing and even deathly.

The Pavilion butterflies swoop and cluster in the building. Normally, butterflies are displayed imprisoned under glass: moments of beauty, science, and cruelty. The novelist John Fowles called his own passion for butterflies ‘a lethal perversion’. In his dark novel The Collector, he looks at the nature of obsession through the character of Frederick Clegg, a collector of butterflies who decides to add a captured woman to his ‘collection’. The captive in the cellar is like a pinned butterfly. In the Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles, the murderer is Stapleton, a complex and dangerous man whose relaxation is the collecting of butterflies. In him, Dr Watson saw an ‘impassive, colourless man, with his straw hat and his butterfly net…a creature of infinite patience and craft, with a smiling face and a murderous heart’.

The swarms of butterflies in the Pavilion, at once beautiful and threatening, will both seduce and disturb the visitor and will add another perspective within the narrative of the building.

David Beevers

Keeper of the Royal Pavilion