Artist Spotlight: Alexandra Cope

When it comes to home decor, it’s not unusual to see little pieces of nature make their way indoors. Finding a flower or plant inside someone’s home is no more unusual than finding one out on an evening stroll. There are many more beautiful occurrences in the great outdoors, and Alexandra Cope turns some of the more unconventional ones into beautiful pieces of art.

Cope grew up in Hankinson, North Dakota, and moved to Aberdeen in 2012. A few years later, she started her business Lavender House Products. In the beginning, she focused on photography. Once she started learning graphic design, she started to design t-shirts, and she also started making candles. Some of her most breathtaking pieces, though, are her shadow boxes containing pinned butterflies and moths.

“I found a monarch butterfly outside and wanted to learn how to pin it,” she said. “So I threw together a shadow box with moths and flowers.”

She displayed her creation at West Oak, and soon after people requested that she make some more.

“I had a fear of bugs at first,” she said. “Pinning and touching them helped me get used to them.”

Although Cope’s first butterfly used a specimen that she found, almost all of her butterflies and moths are purchased from butterfly aviaries around the world.

“I did a lot of research,” Cope said. “The Sioux Falls Butterfly House helped and gave me some resources.”

Butterfly aviaries bring in butterflies from the wild to lay eggs. A female can lay thousands of eggs, and only a handful of them will survive in the wild. In an aviary, the butterflies are safe from disease, parasites, and predators, so the survival rate is much higher. Some are released into the wild, and the rest are kept in the aviary for the rest of their natural lifespan, which is roughly a week after hatching from the chrysalis.

Pinning insects requires a lot of prep work. When Cope orders a butterfly or moth, it arrives dry.

“They’d break and fall apart if you tried to pin them, so you need to rehydrate them,” she said.

There are two different methods that Cope uses to rehydrate the insects. In the first method, the specimen is placed in a moisture container for one or two days, depending on its size. In the other, Cope injects the specimen with boiling water, which only takes about an hour. The rehydration process can be skipped by freezing live insects, but Cope avoids that method.

After pinning, each insect needs to dry out again. The entire process takes a couple days. Assembling the shadow boxes usually takes about four to six hours, depending on the size, and each one contains one or two butterflies or moths.

Pinning insects is a delicate process, so there are inevitably a few casualties. Cope saves the wings that fall off of butterflies and uses them to decorate small glass jars. She also buys wings in bulk from aviaries that salvage parts from their own specimens.

The pinning process for butterflies and moths is similar. Moths are prone to matting, so the rehydration process can be a bit trickier. Other insects require different techniques, so Cope hasn’t pinned any others yet, but she hopes to add more species one day.

Cope said that her favorite butterfly is Menelaus blue morpho. The ones that she uses in her shadow boxes come from Peru.

“It’s a cool butterfly,” she said. “They’re not actually colored blue. They have microscopic scales that refract light, which makes them look blue.”

The structure of their wings have inspired anti-counterfeiting measures in currency.

“There’s so much information about it, and that’s part of why it’s my favorite,” she said.

Another favorite specimen is the rare Priam’s birdwing butterfly.

This year, Cope started attending various vendor shows. She has attended ten shows so far, and she hopes to add more to her calendar.

“I try to bring as many pieces as I can to each show,” she said. “I bring about ten at a time, but I would like to have thirty of them one day.”

Cope will also be teaching some classes on entomology pinning. The first one is scheduled for November 9 at Abandoned Magic here in Aberdeen.

Her pieces can be found at Abandoned Magic in the Uptown Aberdeen. For more information, visit her Facebook page at Lavender House Products. //