Author Description

"7S, or, Seven Silks, began as a six-year research project (2010-2016) 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. 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: 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. The form of the poem strand is modeled on silk at the DNA level--the six-character repeat in the silk genome is the basis for the poem's six-letter line. The shape of the strand reflects both the filament deposition pattern that silkworms create when making their cocoon, as well as the beta sheet structures of silk proteins, both of which form like the weft thread in weaving...7S is an artist book edition that comprises the physical materials that informed Bervin's research, as well as newly-conceived iterations of the project. It includes an archival box containing two prints on silk fabric--the poem strand printed on silk, folded; a photograph of a silk cocoon printed on silk, a signed copy of Silk Poems (Nightboat Books, 2017) by Jen Bervin; a Bombyx Mori cocoon in glass jar, a vial with a scroll printed on silk, a vial with a skein of silk thread, a glass vial of liquid silk fibroin,