BOOKWORMS

Tammy Lee Baikie (Johannesburg)

Book worms

Mixed media

25 cm x 33,5 cm x 46 cm

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Book worms uses sustainable, wild harvesting of mopane worms to explore knowledge systems and how one knowledge system can overshadow others.

The book, etching and specimen collection are tokens of the dominant Western scientific paradigm. But in small ways – from the cracked image to the words of Zimbabwean villagers on the drawer cover – the work chips at its monolithic status. My aim is not to dismiss science, but to highlight its limitations and how these can be overcome with indigenous ecological knowledge.

The candle soot etching and suspended worms in the book visualise this. The picture is inspired by a scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of a caterpillar's proleg, produced by Prof Barry Trimmer and Dr Huai-Ti Lin for a paper on how these insects grip surfaces and move. So, how is it that this mechanism fails when the fat, sluggish 'worms' are ready to pupate and are easily dislodged from trees?

As a medium, fragile soot or carbon, the elemental basis of all life, is a reminder of how deeply we are embedded in our planetary ecology. We cannot learn or survive in isolation. SEM specimens, too, require a gold coating so they are not crushed in the machine’s vacuum chamber. But the metal is not visible in the greyscale images. Nor is the etching’s golden crack when the light box is switched off. Without contextual, indigenous insights, we have blind spots in our knowledge. [1] 

Reference

[1] “The neuromechanics of proleg grip release” published in Journal of Experimental Biology (2018) 221, jeb173856. doi:10.1242/jeb.173856