Interview
March 2005
Richmond, VA

AK: I'm interested in hearing more about your decision-making process as this project developed. Would you talk about your initial concept and why you chose to pursue this particular direction?
NB: I have a genuine love of the object and a desire to manifest something tactilely beautiful. Rarely does my work come from a place of conflict, but I have recently struggled with a feeling of political and spiritual discord. My experience of fear and anger towards Islam left me deeply agitated and in need of cultivating an understanding of a tradition not my own. I wanted to engage with something integral to it that I strongly admire. Islam has the same prohibition against representation as Judaism, the faith in which I was raised, but unlike Judaism, it developed a rich visual culture – a geometric, mathematically-derived abstraction that celebrates spirituality and fosters meditation. The act of making Butterflies helped me to step into a place of appreciation rather than opposition.

AK: Where did you derive the patterns that were used on the butterfly wings?
NB: They came from a book written by mathematicians who wanted to create a user-friendly guide showing how Islamic patterns mathematically break down so that they can be reproduced quickly on the computer. The authors' intention was to make accessible this rich tradition of tessellating geometric images so that Muslim artists in today's world can continue it.

AK: What in particular appeals to you about pattern?
NB: I believe pattern embodies the most fundamental aspects of human existence, on a physical as well as a spiritual level. Pattern is abstraction, but it is also very specific. It occupies a place between non-material things that we can't represent and material things, actual materiality; it lets you play in that space.

AK: What about the image and form of the butterfly itself?
NB: I told a friend that I would be making butterflies, and she thought that was really cheesy. But the butterfly relates to the botanical imagery that has preoccupied me for about five years now. These images interest me because that is where nature most clearly manifests repetition and pattern. The flower is about sexuality and beauty and reproduction and seduction, but it also follows mathematical principles.
A flower and a butterfly are both universal symbols, which I like. They are often dismissed, relegated to being unimportant and also feminine, which I hate. Pattern and the decorative play with those things that are frequently perceived as meaningless, mundane, or clichéd, but then you find the same thing about human nature showing up again and again.

AK: You've layered cultural images and references in earlier pieces, but here that aspect of your work has become more overt.
NB: I agree with you. I very consciously took something outside of myself and juxtaposed two things that aren't usually conjoined. Part of my inspiration came from thinking about the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher (1898-1972). As a young man, Escher went to the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, where he studied the Moorish architecture and used the Islamic patterns he encountered there as the basis of all of his work, combining them with images like fish and butterflies. So in a way, I did exactly what he did.

AK: When you reached a point in the studio of assembling the butterflies and deciding what to do with them next, you mentioned you were faced with several choices.
NB: In every instance with this piece, I've gone with the more subtle choice. The forms remained white, but I chose to paint the backs of the butterflies with colors that would reflect on the surface of the wall behind them, so the result was something you perceived as opposed to something you were given. The viewer has to look long enough to see color.
Ceramics has a tradition of creating tile, which permeates Islamic architecture. I've never produced tiles, but with this work I have kind of created butterfly tiles; they are flatter than anything I've made. At one point, I thought about glazing them with traditional Islamic colors. The more active choice, however, was not to be repetitious but to present instead something that was barely audible and unfamiliar. People would have to pay some attention and discover it; that's the engaged-verb choice as opposed to the narrative choice.

AK: In comparison with earlier installations, it is more subtle.
NB: I don't really feel like I've done installations before.

AK: OK, then wall pieces.
NB: This is the difference, though. I feel like I've made objects that I have installed as groupings on the wall. The process is to look at those different things. I've been playing with a space that is simultaneously two and three dimensions. But with this piece, I also feel like I'm stepping into something that becomes a little more experiential – an installation in the way I perceive installation: it needs the moment to be effective.

AK: The moment when the viewer encounters it?
NB: Yes. You experience the work primarily by being in its presence, moving your body through space, and perceiving it, as opposed to thinking about it as you look at an image.
At the core level, I'm trying to engage people in the experience of looking. I'm not really trying to say as much as I'm trying to create situations where people have to get out of their own heads a little bit in order to just pay attention to looking. Your mind quiets, hopefully, and then something else happens.
This also applies to my drawings, which I think have more of a hallucinogenic quality. I spend hours alone making repetitive little lines; I think of it as meditation. I'm trying to engage people in something of the same meditative state that I enter when I make them.