Botanical Butterfly

Somewhere between a breath and a blink, a white butterfly holds still in a world that will not stop moving. Around it, layers of botanical life — petals dissolving into foliage, tendrils curling through wax, ghost-images of flowers and grasses pressing forward from beneath — create a forest that exists just past the edge of ordinary sight. Trisha Keefe has spent a lifetime learning to see these in-between places, and here she invites us in. The work began, as all of hers do, with looking. A photograph taken with her own hands. An image coaxed into composite layers, then mounted to wood and sealed beneath warm encaustic wax applied in passes — each one a quiet act of intention. Into the cooled surface she pressed more pigment, more color, more depth, until the butterfly seemed not placed but revealed, as if it had always been there, waiting for the wax to make it visible. This is the bridge Keefe builds in her Glorieta studio: between the overlooked and the luminous, between the world the eye moves past and the world the spirit already knows. The butterfly does not symbolize transformation here — it embodies it, suspended in wax and light and prayer, asking only that you pause long enough to let the layers speak.