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Art for those who appreciate the whimsical, mystic and macabre.

Est. 2019 · Asheville, North Carolina

Whimsical, mystic, macabre

Ethically sourced butterflies, painted bones and dried flora, sealed under glass one piece at a time. Nothing here is printed, reproduced, or made twice.

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The cabinet

Each piece is unique. When one sells it is gone — there is no second edition of a butterfly.

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How the work is made

Four things I will not compromise on

Ethically sourced

Farm-raised specimens that lived out their adult lives. No wild-taken stock, no CITES Appendix I species, species and country of origin listed on every page.

Conservation framed

Acid-free mounts, stainless entomological pins, UV-filtering glazing and a continuous dust seal. Built to be a hundred-year object, not a five-year one.

Hand-dried flora

Every flower is harvested, pressed or silica-dried and rested in the studio. No commercial dyes — if a colour will not survive honestly, I use a different flower.

Documented

Species, common name and origin written on the back of every finished piece. A specimen without provenance is just a dead insect.

Line illustration of a shadow box containing a pinned butterfly and dried flora
The process

Three days of waiting, one afternoon of work

The composition takes an afternoon. The construction takes three days, and most of that is waiting — for a specimen to relax in the humidity chamber, for it to dry on the setting board, for adhesive to cure fully before anything goes near glass.

A dried butterfly is brittle enough to snap in half if you try to open its wings. Before anything can be posed it has to be rehydrated until the joints move again: twelve hours for a small specimen, up to three days for a large swallowtail.

Read the full build guide

Field notes

The species in the cabinet

Drag, swipe or use the arrows. Every specimen in the shop is named, and the name is written on the back of the piece.

Idea leuconoe

Giant tree nymph · Nymphalidae

Wingspan 120–140 mm. Coastal Southeast Asia. Semi-translucent wings and a famously slow, drifting flight it can afford because its larvae sequester cardiac glycosides from milkweed vine — it is genuinely toxic and advertises the fact.

Euripus consimilis

Painted courtesan · Nymphalidae

Wingspan 60–80 mm. Northern India to southern China. A textbook Batesian mimic: the female wears the costume of an unpalatable crow butterfly, the male looks like nothing in particular because he does not need to.

Charaxes bernardus

Tawny rajah · Charaxinae

Wingspan 80–100 mm. India and Southeast Asia. Thick-bodied, fast and erratic, rarely seen at flowers — charaxines prefer fermenting fruit and tree sap. The heavy thorax means a longer relax and a longer dry.

Cethosia biblis

Red lacewing · Heliconiinae

Wingspan 80–90 mm. Scarlet above, a geometric white-and-orange mosaic beneath, with scalloped lace along the margins. Chemically defended — the red is a warning, and it is the pigment most in need of UV-filtering glass.

Papilio sataspes

Dead-night swallowtail · Papilionidae

Wingspan 90–110 mm. Endemic to Sulawesi. Reads flat black until light moves across it, then throws back deep green and violet — structural colour, made of geometry rather than pigment, and therefore permanent.

Aphrissa statira

Statira sulphur · Pieridae

Wingspan 55–70 mm. Central and South America. Famous for mass movements — migratory columns numbering in the hundreds of thousands cross Panama and Costa Rica each season.

How to read a wing

0Years making
0Pieces sealed
0UV blocked by glazing
0Every single piece
The journal

Long reads from the studio

Craft, ethics, entomology and the two-thousand-year history of finding death decorative.

Craft

The Anatomy of a Shadow Box

A shadow box is not a picture frame with extra depth. It is a small sealed room, and everything in it — glazing, spacer, mount, backing, seal — is doing a job. A full walk-through of how one is built.

12 min read
Ethics

Where Our Butterflies Come From

Nearly every butterfly in this shop was raised on a farm, lived out its adult life, and died of old age. Here is how that supply chain works, where it fails, and the four questions that separate a good seller from a bad one.

14 min read
History

Memento Mori: A Short History of Beautiful Death

The skull on the shelf is two thousand years old as an idea. Tracing the memento mori from a whisper in a Roman ear through Dutch still life, Victorian mourning and into contemporary oddity collecting.

15 min read

All six articles