Artworks

Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems by Charlotte Lagarde, 2016

WATCH VIDEO 

For the grand opening of Source (2023), the artist’s first west coast survey, the gallery’s Media Room featured Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems by Charlotte Lagarde (2016), a film that follows Bervin’s multi-year research and fabrication of the Silk Poems project (2010 – 2016) supported by a grant from Creative Capital, developed with expertise from more than thirty international textile archives, medical libraries, nanotechnology and biomedical labs, and sericulture sites in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

In Silk Poems, visual artist and author Jen Bervin melds the medium's traditional applications with cutting edge research, engaging with silk's cultural, scientific and linguistic complexities. Silk is biocompatible with human tissue; the immune system can accept silk on surfaces as sensitive as the human brain. Bervin collaborated with scientists David Kaplan and Fiorenzo Omenetto at the Tufts University Bioengineering Department who pioneered reverse engineered liquefied silk and new uses for it – among these: an implantable biosensor on nanoimprinted clear silk film to monitor blood chemistry. Elaborating on this component of their research, Bervin wrote a poem to be inscribed on the silk biosensor. The project stems from her belief that poems have work to do, and that reading such a biosensor inside the body is not a neutral context, but rather one pre-inscribed with concern about health and mortality, written in a material with a significant international history. The poem acts as a kind of talisman, written from the perspective of the silkworm, addressed to the person with the silk biosensor implanted in their body.