SWALLOWTAIL

What happens when what we create is no longer entirely our own?

Swallowtail, part of Amy Kertzer's ongoing project The Art of Being Changed, explores the vulnerability and possibility of collective creation—what happens when we surrender control over something we've begun and invite others to carry it forward.

Throughout TEDx Coopers Mills, participants entered a weaving already in motion. Each person responded to what came before, contributed something of their own, and left their contributions open to whoever might come next.

No contribution was entirely independent. Each gesture entered into a relationship with the choices of others. Each addition altered the possibilities for the next, allowing individual intentions to intersect, challenge, redirect, and transform one another.

The resulting artwork was not a predetermined design, but a record of accumulated influence. Its form emerged through a succession of encounters, shaped by what participants introduced, transformed, and relinquished. Kertzer's final interventions brought the accumulated contributions into dialogue, giving the work cohesion without erasing the unpredictability of its making.

The work explores the space between autonomy and interdependence, and the vulnerability inherent in collective creation. It asks whether connection is defined not simply by what we share, but by our willingness to be affected by what we don't.

Here, surrendering control is not a loss of authorship, but an expansion of it.