Marissa's Bio About Someone

The dollhouse full of silkworms sits in her studio – a space within a space, salvaged, a coincidental home. “The worms aren’t for silk,” she says. It takes awhile to understand that they aren’t for anything, they don’t exist to serve a purpose than to live out their own lives, evolved without agency, marked by dependency.

“Silkworms have had their instincts bred out of them by the silk industry,” she informs me. I learn that they are, or have evolved into, somewhat stupid creatures. She has to literally drop their food on their heads, or they won’t travel to eat it. She picks one up to move it closer to a potential mate. She knows they have to choose a place to spin, but she monitors and suggests suitable locations in the dollhouse. “They can’t spin on a flat surface, they need some kind of wall.”

They need a lot, it seems.

Home. She has lived in the same house for eighteen years. She has wanted to make art, and finally carved out a space for it by returning to student-hood. School as a job marks out the necessity of her work, legitimizes the space and time needed to create. Witnessing becomes necessary on many levels.

Dependency. Addiction. Intervention?

“Sometimes your interventions backfire. You see them suffering and you try to go in and help, but it ends up causing more suffering. And then they die. Slowly.” All life is finite, and many things go wrong. With silkworms, the better care they get, the shorter their lives are. Is a short life any less meaningful than a long one?