Jean-Henri Fabre’s biography is often cast in a mythic light: born to peasants in southern France, he rises on the hot air of autodidactism to a schoolteacher position from which after several decades he is fired for admitting women to his plant physiology classes. Bailed out of ruin by his friend John Stuart Mill, at age 50 he manages to purchase a unfarmable plot of land on which he writes the ten volume set of insect observations for which he is known today. In his final years, he is lionized: his books begin to sell, a statue in the town square is erected, he is visited by the president of France, and is nominated for a Nobel Prize. Victor Hugo describes Fabre as “the insect’s Homer.”
The genus name of the processionary caterpillars, Thaumetopoea, is derived from the Greek thaumatóeis and poiéo: meaning wonderful, marvelous, strange; and meaning to make, to produce, to write poetry, to write as a poet. To make something strange and marvelous then is to cast it into verse. And so the processionary caterpillar, as the author of her own lines, must be considered a poet: the line of caterpillars as a line of verse, wriggling toward some pine needles. Of course the caterpillar is not a medium-bound creature. She’ll soon change into a butterfly—in other words, into a painter.
Processionary caterpillars are so called because at certain times of the year they form processions, sometimes meters long. Driven by a fixation on instinct, Fabre schemes to form this procession into a loop. He manages this and then watches for a full week as the caterpillars complete orbit after orbit around the rim of a flowerpot before finally breaking off. He reads and records their repetition, as unable to bring himself out of the loop as they are. It is cruel in a way, definitely, but there’s also something tender in Fabre’s commitment to the insects as he watches them for days on end. “The liberating accident,” he calls it when the loop finally does break.


These piece were made for Take Care, a group exhibition at Ground Level Platform curated by Luna Goldberg featuring new collaborative works by Jamiece Adams, David Heo, Dana Nechmad, Angeliki Tsoli, Julia Sharpe, and Willy Smart.