Web designers
The humble spider’s silk appears in dresses, musical instruments… and caps of death
gossamer Days Spiders, humans and their threads Eleanor Morgan
Strange Attractor Press 2016 Pb, pp167, illus, plates, bib, £14.99, ISBN 9781907222351
This study of the human use of spider silk is infused with a creative sensibility. Only an artist would approach the relationship between spiders and sound through a tale of spiders attracted to the singing of 19th century schoolgirls; only an artist would follow this by creating a spider silk necklace to which she attached a web while she hummed, to experience and observe the response.
Eleanor Morgan has a deep and intuitive relationship with spiders, beginning with her attempts to collect and use spider silk in her artworks. From this a life-long obsession developed, and Gossamer Days illustrates just how far she has taken this. Beautifully illustrated with her own drawings, it begins with Morgan’s experiments to collect useable spider silk and expands to consider how others have tried to do the same. There have been many failed attempts to produce it commercially, leading to innovative niche uses, in gunsights and astronomical instruments for example, where spider silk is perfect for creating precise cross-hairs and imaginative one-offs. One of the plates shows a magnificent and laboriously produced spider silk dress created for the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Other cultures have also found important uses for spider silk, often poorly understood by Westerners. The Wellcome Collection holds a ‘smothering hood’ of spider silk, allegedly used to suffocate widows in Vanuatu. Other museums have similar items described as night caps, smoking caps and a ‘cap of death’, all of which are part of the regalia for male initiation ceremonies in the island in which spider webs play an important part – Morgan includes a resonantly spooky photo of an initiate clad head to foot in webs. Elsewhere they have become vital parts of musical instruments, including the extraordinary nyastaranga from northern India – horns pressed against the throat and activated by humming that use spider silk as a resonating membrane. Morgan has gone to considerable lengths to find these uses for spider silk; they have not been well documented and their sources are obscure and often confused. She has a fine eye for character, excavating a gallery of eccentrics and innovators as obsessed with the silk as she is.
Morgan has a naturalist’s eye for spiders’ identification and behaviour, and her writing is among the best nature writing you will find anywhere. She has delved into the biology of silk (spiders produce seven different kinds) and the web construction of different species, and seems to have retuned her senses to immerse herself in a world filled with spiders, closing the book with a description of the seven species she can see on her urban balcony, where she sits, entirely at home with her arachnid neighbours.
This is a delightful book to hold and to read, an excellent addition to the library of anyone interested in the stranger corners of biology or human culture.