I came across the theme ‘Traces’ for this year’s member’s exhibition at the KZNSA Gallery. During the process of s preparing for another exhibition, the idea for this work emerged. I absolutely loved creating it, and then was so pleased to be awarded The Joan Emmanuel Floating Trophy. Here are a few images of the work taken in my studio before submission, with the statement for the work below:
Fragility of Wings
Lara Mellon
This assemblage responds to Traces through five sanded and whitewashed panels made from earlier works. Rather than erasing the past, the process reveals it: fragments of colour, texture, and collaged map surfaces remain—subtle records of what has been. Embedded within the panels are found butterfly wings, remnants of lives once lived in freedom, still carrying the memory of flight.
Beneath the panels, forty glass specimen bottles are arranged in ordered formation. Each contains a small photographic figure, drawn from people observed walking in and around my home in Durban. These “butterfly-people” are given wings, suggesting longing, movement, and possibility.
Yet they remain contained—corked, classified, and marked with coloured pins that reference systems of categorisation and insect pinning. The forty-first bottle stands open and empty: a quiet gesture toward release.
Fragility of Wings reflects on what remains after movement, after flight—on the quiet traces left behind by things once alive with motion and freedom. This assemblage brings together suspended fragments, carefully held within glass vials, suggesting both preservation and containment. Each element becomes a small act of noticing, of gathering what might otherwise be lost.
The work considers the tension between transience and care: how we hold onto what is delicate, and how, in doing so, we both honour and alter it. Above, the softly rendered panels evoke impressions rather than images—echoes of wing, air, and dispersal—suggesting memory as something shifting and incomplete.
Together, these elements speak to the fragility of freedom, and to the human impulse to collect, protect, and make meaning from what remains. In this way, the work becomes a quiet archive of the ephemeral—a meditation on presence, absence, and the traces that connect them.
(above) The five panels
(below) Close ups from the panels
