Scale insects (Hemiptera: Coccidae), a plant-sucking parasite of a cactus (Family Cactaceae), is wild-harvested or farmed and dried to make carmine. Carmine or carminic acid is used as a natural red dye. This insect (also called cochenille) may be the first New World domesticated insect, like silk moths and bees have been domesticated in the Old World. There are >8000 species of scale insects; elsewhere in the world, different species provide red color and some are the source of shellac (used as a wood varnish in Asia). Scale insects have been implicated, along with lichens, as a possible source of the manna which was eaten by exiled Jews (Book of Exodus). A small grant from KU’s Commons Seed Grant is allowing me to develop an interdisciplinary project with textile artist, Mary Anne Jordan/KU Visual Arts, her husband, the photographer Luke Jordan/KU Visual Arts, Nilda Callañaupa, Master weaver and Director of Cusco’s Center for Traditional Textiles, and Maria de los Angeles, an ethnobotanist at the Universidad Nacional Agragria La Molina in Lima, Peru. I anticipate an exciting, inspiring, enlightening, and colorful journey ahead.
Insect artist, Jennifer Angus, has a beautiful room with cochenille walls at the “Wonder” exhibition in Washtington D.C.’s Renwick Gallery:
http://www.jenniferangus.com/
Traveling Exhibition “The Red That Colored The World”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHOse3zXX9c
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