The fly is that uninvited guest that carries the quiet power of being small yet intrusive. It is a body that rarely inspires admiration or wonder, most of the time, we simply want it gone. But of lately, the image of the fly has stayed with me and has become a part of my ongoing project on small and everyday figures.

There is a dream I had from over six years ago that keeps returning: I was lying in bed in my small student apartment, when I noticed a dark cloud in the upper left corner of the kitchen. As I moved closer, I saw that it was a swarm of flies, gathered around a box of strawberries I had forgotten on a high shelf. Later, in a conversation with my father, a memory of my grandmother surfaced. When he was a child, she used to hide a box of strawberries for herself, somewhere up on a shelf. Around this time, a real fly had also moved into my home, most likely to overwinter. They were given a name and spent most of their time resting on my white kitchen cabinet.

The dream dropped an anchor of strawberries and flies into my everyday life, an image that has followed me for years. The flies became a link, a passage between the bodily and the hidden.

It took a few years, but eventually I made a print on a large sheet of paper (70 x 100 cm) with a small, life-sized fly near the edge of the page. I tore the paper along the printing plate’s edge so that it became more of an object than a surface. I also created a relief that lifted the fly from the paper, turning it into a small body resting above the surface.

Perhaps the fly points toward something we have been trained not to see? It is drawn to the borders of the body, to decay and to impermanence. It marks what we try to hide in our daily lives: the organic, the mortal and the unwanted. The things we prefer to keep sealed away. It arrives when something begins to change quietly.

Most often, we try to keep the fly out of the picture. It can provoke discomfort and is not conventionally aesthetic, nor clear in its symbolism. And yet, the fly is always there, at the edge and around us. Small, but disruptive, buzzing of something that moves along the borders of the everyday and the waking. It is drawn to the sweet things beginning to ferment, to what is left over and what is in the open. That box tucked away or forgotten on a shelf, a memory that in hindsight begins to ferment.