Among the many high school
science projects, the insect collection will always stand out in my mind. During class we were given glass jars,
fingernail polish remover, cotton balls, pins and a shoe box—mission to trap,
gas, pin, and label. Everyone
proceeded with the project until we each had 20 insects neatly arranged and
identified. The following day,
however, to everyone’s horror we each had 20 writhing and wriggling insects on
pins. Despite the fact that the
class was totally traumatized, the teacher, Mr. Flanagan, laughed and insisted
on grading the projects first, before letting us kill the insects in a humane
way. I suspect he had been huffing
the fingernail polish.
Later in life I read, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. In this journalistic, yet poetic book
she contemplates life and nature while exploring her home range of Tinker Creek
in Virginia. Dillard describes a
similar situation to my own insect debacle, "I used to kill insects with carbon tetrachloride—cleaning
fluid vapor—and pin them in cigar boxes, labeled, in neat rows. That was man
years ago: I quit when one day I opened a cigar box lid and saw a carrion
beetle, staked down high between its wing covers, trying to crawl, swimming on
its pin. It was dancing with its
own shadow, untouching, and had been for days.” Think this sort of shadow is something many have
experienced—wriggling on pins, mutilated.
These memories resurface from
time to time when a grasshopper or butterfly crosses my path--An act where one
is trying to create something fascinating or beautiful but discovering the
brutality that underlies it. Other times it will be the botched or overdone
face job so common out here in Los Angeles or tuning into the news and learning
about the garment factory fires in Bangladesh.
I
started making collection sketches recently. These are of plucked katydid wings combined with arms.
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Plucked wings, sketchbook experiments, 2013 |