Flight is a theme I keep returning to. It shows up again and again in what I make - bird wings grown across the back of a bag, dragonflies caught mid-hover on a flap, butterfly wings poised at the edge of leather as if the next second belongs only to them. I don't plan it this way. It simply keeps coming back, the way certain thoughts do.
I think it's because flight is the most honest image I know for freedom. Not freedom as an idea, but freedom as something that happens in the body - the exact moment weight stops mattering. A bird doesn't decide to be free and then fly. It flies, and the flying is the freedom. There's no gap between the two. That immediacy is what I try to hold onto in every piece: not a bag about flight, but a bag that carries the instant flight becomes possible.
This particular purse holds that idea in its most literal form.
The butterflies across its surface aren't printed, and they aren't appliqued. They're born the way almost nothing in nature is born - from heat and pressure. I paint the leather with foil, then press it under high temperature until the foil binds into the hide and the shape rises, fragile and permanent at once. Every wing is placed by hand, one temperature cycle at a time, which means no two butterflies - on this piece or any other - will ever come out exactly alike. Small variations in heat, in pressure, in the leather's own grain, decide how each one finally looks. I don't fully control that. I set the conditions and let the process finish the thought.
There's something in that I keep thinking about. The butterflies didn't ask for the heat. The heat came anyway, and pressed on them anyway, and what came out the other side wasn't something crushed - it was wings. Not despite the heat. Because of it.
It's not so different from what shapes us. The weights we carry rarely feel like anything we'd choose. They press, they hold their temperature, they don't ask permission. And yet, more often than we'd expect, what comes out the other side isn't something smaller. It's something that can finally lift.
This purse is that thought, worn on the shoulder. A small, permanent record of the idea that what shapes us doesn't have to be the thing that stops us - it can be the exact thing that opens the wings we didn't know we had.
One purse. One set of butterflies, marked by heat that will never repeat itself. Made by hand, in Arad.
This purse has already found its person. The wings still waiting for someone are here.
