My sculpture ‘Metamorphosis’ is inspired by the renaissance illustrator and entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian who is credited with some of the first depictions of the live stages of butterflies and moths. She is also the first person to link different lepidoptera species to specific food plants. Merian was also a very successful business women who published her own works, and was daring enough to travel on a trade ship to the Dutch colony of Surinam to document the flora and fauna of unknown exotic lands. There she befriended native people who taught her about the local plants and their medicinal uses. She criticized the Dutch colonists for treating the native people badly. Her work was published in German and Dutch.

In the process of Metamorphosis, a wingless, heavy-built herbivore (the caterpillar) changes into a butterfly: lightly built, beautiful, and able to fly. Inside the chrysalis, much of the caterpillars tissues are dissolved, because muscles for creeping and a digestive tract for eating foliage are no longer needed. Instead, the butterfly needs muscles for flight and a proboscis to drink nectar. So the caterpillar changes inside and out. Change requires courage to try something new, and trust that it will be achieved. Without change there is no progress, and the butterfly would never fly!

The caterpillar is part of the Metamorphosis sculpture by Thomas Berger, installed at the Hearth Food Marked in downtown Portsmouth /NH.

The chrysalis is the transitional stage between a caterpillar and a butterfly. On the inside, the complicated process of dissolving and re-building tissues takes place. It is a metaphor for profound change.

The sculptor Thomas Berger is working on the installation of the monumental sculpture Metamorphosis, which consists of a caterpillar, a chrysalis, and a butterfly resting on a stone flower. The writing on the underside of the butterfly wings reads ‘Dare To Change’

Detail of Metamorphosis sculpture by Thomas Berger showing a butterfly egg and the signature of scientific illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian on the underside of a leaf of a stone flower, which serves as the base of a butterfly sculpture

Gold-leaved perforations carry light to the underside of the wings, where patches of gold reveal the words ‘Dare to Change’