Pia Guilmoth and Jesse Saffire: Fishworm

Pia Guilmoth and Jesse Saffire – Fishworm

Void

Fishworm brings together material gathered by Pia P. Guilmoth and Jesse B. Saffire across seven years of searching through the discarded remains of rural central Maine. Working within a sixty mile radius of their home, the artists collect what has been left behind in abandoned houses, sheds, hunting cabins and yard sales. The resulting archive ranges from personal snapshots to commercial prints and private collections, forming a layered portrait of small town histories and the cultural undercurrents that shape them.

The artists, both queer and trans women, acknowledge their own ambivalent relationship with these places. Their position within the landscape informs the project’s tone, which is marked by both attachment and uncertainty. The found images are scanned using a weathered office copier, a decision that reinforces the provisional nature of the material and the uneven preservation of local memory.

The book functions as an informal record of rural life, filtered through a process of reordering, interruption and visual collage. Past and present converge through the act of collecting, raising questions about belonging, erasure and the stories that communities keep or relinquish. Fishworm ultimately offers a reassembled history that is both affectionate and critical, shaped by the artists’ ongoing negotiation with the place they call home.

232 pages
Softcover, first edition