Mended Spiderwebs

In the summer of 1998, I had a few weeks to myself on the Finnish island of Pörtö, where I’ve grown up spending summers. Being there puts me in the mind-set I had as a child; I can spend a long time following a bug around or doing something similarly interesting.

One day, I noticed that many of the spiderwebs in the forest and around our house were in a sorry condition, full of holes and looking abandoned. I found some tweezers and red sewing thread in our house and made an attempt to repair a web, inserting small pieces of thread one at a time. It took a while, and in the process I often caused further damage when the tweezers got tangled in the sticky strands of the web or when my hands brushed up against it by accident. I was hardly doing the spider any favors.

The next morning, I discovered a pile of red threads lying on the ground. At first, I assumed that the wind had blown them out; on closer inspection, it became clear that the spider had restored the web to perfect condition, throwing my threads out in the process. Only at this point did the situation become interesting to me. The spider’s retort suggested that it was as compulsive as I was, and I sparred like this with many spiders over the following weeks. The spiders always rejected and discarded my repairs, even from webs that looked thoroughly abandoned. I collected many of these rejected repairs and framed them; these framed patches are often shown next to the photographs of what they had looked like in the web, before getting kicked out.