Pests of Public Importance

'Pests of Public Importance' is a 2017 mokuhanga work that takes the official language of public health entomology — the category of insects classified as threats to human welfare — and subjects it to the precise, patient attention of hand-printing on [washi](/glossary/washi). The title, borrowed from bureaucratic taxonomy, sets up a tension between institutional dismissal and the close visual regard that mokuhanga enables: water-based pigments built through multiple careful passes on dampened Japanese paper, pressed with a [baren](/glossary/baren) in a technique that demands sustained, intimate contact with each impression. The insect subjects likely include species that carry human disease, damage crops, or otherwise register as threats — mosquitoes, cockroaches, beetles — rendered with the same formal respect Vollmer brings to all her insect work. The work belongs to the late series that includes 'Love Beyond Reason' and 'All the Way to the Bank,' collectively forming a sustained meditation on human attitudes toward non-human species and the categories through which we manage, exploit, or discard them.