In my practice, making work out of archives is akin to breathing new life into the dead. As I spent more time in archives, I began to see the boxes that stored the materials as coffins — a final resting place — and then as cocoons — an intermediate site of transformation. To commune with and revive the dead through archival projects is a form of magic, and requires necromantic powers. Following this train of thought, I worked with the department of Conservation and Housing at Yale to make custom archival boxes bearing symbols of moths and cicadas, two insects that undergo complete metamorphosis in their cocoons, but still retain their memories after the radical change. In this and other aspects, they embody to me the latent hope and promise of archives, and my etching of their forms into the archival containers themselves constitutes a blessing, a talisman, a spell.

As a spin-off to this project, I also made a series of prints inspired by library catalog cards and distributed them across a catalog card cabinet at the Sterling Memorial Library. Long defunct, the cabinet has been instead populated by notes of encouragement, rumors, and contemplation left anonymously by students. It felt only right that my moths and cicadas should join this ecosystem, once obsolete but thriving with new life.