Butterfly street installations migrate across Indianapolis

There is a new invasive species swarming through the American Midwest. The as-yet unnamed species of butterfly, colored an electric blue, has been spotted gathering throughout public spaces in Indianapolis. But worry not, these beautiful creatures won't affect the local ecosystem. The colorful creations are the work of Indy native Tasha Lewis, who crafts guerilla installations featuring hundreds of butterflies made from recycled materials. Using a printing process known as cyanotype, she prints each insect in cyan-blue on cotton fabric. Each specimen is embedded with magnets so the artist can easily place them on any magnetic surface -- and just as easily take them off without any damage to the surface. It's a new approach to street art, and it's one we can get behind.

"The cyanotype is a process of documenting," she says. "The resultant image is a kind of scientific stand-in for the actual object in question. It is the trace of the original. In this way, like cyanotype’s use for building blue prints in more recent centuries, my work is formed as the re-presentation of something real; it is somehow not quite the object itself."

Follow Tasha's "guerilla sculpture" escapades on Tumblr.

(via Colossal, Empty Kingdom)