As a Creative Assistant to Yoshiko Wada, I worked with silk cocoons and cochineal dye, extracting pigment by hand-grinding beetles in a coffee mill. We dyed mountains of cocoons, coaxing out soft pinks, deep blood reds, and inky blacks, their threads still intact. Each cocoon was suspended from the ceiling by its own silk filament, creating a haunting, weightless field.

As part of the piece, I was buried beneath the still-wet, fragrant cocoons, immersed in the physical weight of creation. We created the piece in China and later exhibited it in Switzerland, reflecting on the violence of creation, the unseen deaths behind beauty—the silkworms that spun these cocoons, the countless beetles sacrificed for their pigment, all woven into a single act of making.