I received a research fellowship at the Beinecke Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts in 2022, where I spent many hours among premodern manuscripts exploring the holes eaten by bookworms over centuries. I gathered the words left behind by the worms into an artist’s book of found poetry called “What the Bookworm Reads.” This book intersperses the worms’ poems with my own cyclical text—like "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" in a Mediaval missal.
A few views of "What the Bookworm Reads."
Embodying the role of the bookworm, I drilled holes based on their bites in the corner of a room. The corner became a book gutter and the walls gigantic pages. What if the bookworms’ so-called destructive act is creative and life-sustaining? What can we learn by folding and piercing through walls?
And the wall page can be dog-eared.