Each of the composers has written a programme note to accompany their Composeher work. Read about Sarah’s piece, Papilionum, below.

The transformational processes of insects have fascinated many artists and scientists for centuries. Maria Sibylla Merian, one of the most influential naturalists of the early eighteenth century, was one such scholar. Merian cultivated caterpillars and butterflies from a young age and throughout her rich professional life, studying their habits and recording the changes to their bodies over time. Caterpillars have a voracious appetite, and she tirelessly fed them foliage from the plants on which she found them, studying the symbiotic relationships between insects and plants throughout that process. To document her work, not only did she record her findings in writing, but she produced detailed copperplate illustrations in vibrant colour.

In the early eighteenth century, she travelled to Suriname for two years to document the insect life of South America, producing her ‘magnum opus’ book, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium. In celebration of her life and work, this piece sets excerpts from her vibrant descriptions of the flora and fauna she studied there. While insects were her main focus, each illustration features a central plant, and most of her written descriptions begin by detailing the plant on which the insects in question lived and fed. Her studies of these communities of organisms were paramount to her work. This piece illustrates the transformation of these living things in several miniature movements, with a focus on the importance of communal relationships to this growth and change.

‘Papilionum’ means ‘butterflies’ in Latin, in homage to the scientific title of Merian’s book.