Human Trafficking:

The Butterfly Series

My whole being will exclaim, "Who is like you, O Lord? You rescue the poor from those too strong for them, the poor and needy from those who rob them." Psalm 35:10

Around 2010 I became more deeply aware of and broken over injustices in the world which I had previously been ignorant of. Modern-day slavery, also known as human trafficking, was a topic that turned my heart inside out. From this awareness I began working on an art series that started with using real butterflies in mixed media pieces. As an empathic, I felt deeply the horrors of the reality and began to feel paralyzed over the grief that I couldn’t do anything to physically rescue someone from their chains. Working on this series helped me to process the feelings of helplessness in my heart and with the Lord. I grew to an overwhelming faith that despite how crappy things are going in the world, God has the ears of his heart specially tuned in to the cries of the oppressed.

Many of these pieces are either sold or a part of my personal collection; however, if you are interested in purchasing anything or if you represent a nonprofit organization that works with survivors of trafficking and would like to be considered as recipients of the pieces, please contact me and let me know.

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This piece depicts a young girl cowering under the weight of her butterfly wings. It is a representation of her youthful innocence and beauty - while these things once defined her as a regular young child, full of dreams and ready to embrace the future, they have become the very things the trafficker has exploited her for. Now her life is turned into a living nightmare and she cowers under the weight of her burden.

The butterfly is modeled after a butterfly known as the "Painted Lady". The original artwork is in a private collection.

“Too Heavy”

About “Paralysis”

The "Paralysis" series deals with themes of injustice and human trafficking and the helplessness we often experience when we become aware of something so horrendous contrasted with the helplessness of a young woman trapped inside such a system.

These girls stuck in brothel rooms experience literal cages, with nothing to do but wait for the next customer in line who filters in and out like clockwork. All of life is reduced to an agonizing wait. Paralysis. The butterflies that I used in this series lived out a free life and died naturally in their habitats, however, there is an interesting thing to note about butterflies and the way that collectors sometimes preserve them: if you pin her middle body section, the thorax, the butterfly becomes paralyzed and can then be mounted and preserved as a specimen without damaging her beautiful wings. I was thinking about the correlation of this to the way that a young woman who enters sex trafficking is rendered completely helpless and exploited for her youth and beauty - the very things that are meant to express her freedom.

The "Paralysis" series depicts individual butterflies mounted in 6"x6" frames. The background image is one of two scenes - a typical waiting room you might find in American life, and a filthy brothel room. The waiting rooms that we experience at a typical doctor's visit are clean. Our wait seems forever, but after an “agonizing” hour or two we are free to go home. Contrast that to the waiting room that holds a young girl in a filthy brothel room in a perpetual cycle of waiting. We wait to be healed; she waits to be broken. Over and over again.

Upon discovering that real injustices like human trafficking plague our world, we react with emotions such as shock. Anger. Brokenness. We instinctively want to see justice done, but we don’t see how we could possibly be a part of it. So we slip into a feeling of desperate paralysis. As we sit immobilized in our self-constructed cages of fear and indifference, she wastes away in deep suffering.

The butterflies are mounted professionally atop a limited edition intaglio print and framed in a sturdy 6"x6" black shadowbox frame.