Butterflies have appeared in visual art, poetry and prose for centuries across the world, often as symbols of freedom, transformation and life.

Vincent van Gogh, Emily Bront?, Salvador Dali, Damien Hirst and many others have used butterflies in their works. Their colourful wings represent gentle beauty, fleeting love and a graceful spirit, yet they offer no defence against predators, parasites or extreme weather. Emerging from the chrysalis is a tiring and fragile process for the butterfly. It must pump fluid into its soft, crumpled wings to expand them — a delicate stage when it is highly vulnerable to injury or predators.

A powerful blend of material ecology and poetics permeates ‘99 Butterflies’, a site-specific installation by multidisciplinary Pakistani artist Meherunnisa Asad, under the collective Studio Lél. Commissioned as part of ‘Bradford 2025: UK City of Culture’, this project weaves together memory, material and migration — linking continents, communities and generations.?

Approaching?this ‘Wild Uplands’ project?at Penistone Hill Country Park, visitors travel along winding roads through open moorlands of Yorkshire, high above Bradford. A signposted yet unpaved path guides the way, leading visitors towards the soulful arrangement of butterflies alongside other meaningful installations at a distance. As the hill unfolds, it takes on a new character — a natural dip in the landscape becomes a quiet pass, leading to a peaceful pond.

Butterflies carved from Mardan pink marble inspire awe and introspection at an art installation in Bradford

Scattered across the area are the enchanting stone-carved ‘99 Butterflies’, with their fantastical wings, varying in size and seemingly gently placed there by the wind. It can genuinely be seen as a form of slow art in an age of instant gratification — truly public without any gallery or museum walls. ?

The butterflies are carved from Mardan pink marble, their hues varying from soft blush to deep burgundy. Upon closer inspection, the stone’s cloudy veining resembles old, healed wounds — remnants of pain that no longer bleed but remain etched into memory, anchored in the surface and supporting the installation. Some butterflies suggest flora and fauna, while others resemble maps with geological layers. The marbled surface evokes a fossilised elegy — a delicate, beautiful whisper of eras gone by, buried beneath stone.

From the towering mountains of Pakistan to the Bradford moors in England, this is a story still unfolding — etched not only in marble but also in the lives that shaped it. Asad vividly recalls Peshawar during the 1980s and 1990s. The city served as a refuge for Afghan families fleeing the Soviet-Afghan War. Among these refugees were highly skilled artisans who brought with them rare expertise in stone inlay, particularly pietra dura. From this, Asad’s mother, a self-taught artist, founded Studio Lél — a space dedicated to preserving and developing these historic techniques.

Asad, who later trained as an architect, grew up immersed in the language of craft and memory. She learned not only the technical skill of stone inlay but also its rich transnational history, spanning from 16th-century Florence to Russia, Afghanistan and Mughal India, where it thrived under Emperor Shah Jahan.

Today, Asad leads Studio Lél, reimagining pietra dura through sculptural and often site-specific works that transform this historic technique into a contemporary medium for exploring themes of place, displacement and ecological fragility. Bradford, much like Peshawar, is a city layered with diaspora. It is home to generations who have crossed borders and carried their cultures in fragments — through language, through recipes, through craft.?‘99 Butterflies’?echoes the textures of migration and the beauty born from survival.?

For Studio Lél, 99 (a number one less than 100), they say, symbolises that nothing is ever truly finished. There is always one more soul to name, one more story to remember. And one butterfly must always remain unwritten, unnamed — left open to the viewer. Perhaps it flies above the city. It waits, maybe, in another country.

The carefully cut and shaped butterflies are meant to be touched, felt and even contemplated. At the exhibition, a retired stonemason from Heaton stands before a butterfly that reminds him of his late wife’s brooch. A literary pilgrim to Haworth village recites a few lines from Bront?’s Devoir. One woman leaves a note beneath a small butterfly: “You look like my sister, who flew away before I could say goodbye.”?

‘99 Butterflies’ is on display at Penistone Hill Country Park in Bradford from May 24-October 12, 2025

The writer is an art critic who spends his time in Birmingham and Lahore. He can be reached at aarish.sardar@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 20th, 2025