Massey Klein Gallery is pleased to present Even a worm will turn, a solo exhibition of new embroideries by Peter Frederiksen The exhibition will be on view from April 26th through June 7th. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, April 26th from 6-8pm.

To whom do lions cast their gentle looks?
Not to the beast that would usurp their den.
The smallest worm will turn being trodden on,
And doves will peck in safeguard of their brood.

(William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 3 [Act 2, Scene 2])

What constitutes a bad day? What’s the cause? It’s different for everyone, probably, but I doubt that any day truly starts bad. It grows. It builds to bad. There’s a proverbial last straw, a boiling point, but the fallacy of the single cause warns against oversimplification - no one thing can be assumed to be the sole reason for any single outcome. Instead of looking at blaming the last straw, we should hope to look at the untold many straws that came before it. Our understanding of our worlds should be cumulative, but as detail-oriented animals it can be hard to see the forest for the trees.

Of course, when looking at the state of things in our world, when seeing the forest, it’s hard not to see the flames. Every day feels like a bad day. And none of this feels new. What’s happening has been going on for years, and it won’t stop. Collectively, we’re waking up every day about one stubbed toe away from having a bad day. It is taking less and less to cause a break.

Even a worm will turn is fifteen new embroideries showing breaking points. These are works showing thrashing, flailing, punching, piling, and spinning. Some - like “Every day there’s a new and exciting challenge.” - are abstracted, showcasing messiness and emotion; not quite a dance, but a spiral - the kind of spiral you go through out of exhaustion, frustration, burnout, taking up about as much space as is physically possible, limbs overextended and whipping around. The same blurring effect is utilized in other works, as in “It doesn’t matter what I do, I just keep seeing nails.” These are tight snapshots of action, emphasizing quickness to act, or maybe more specifically lacking the hesitancy and tempering that comes with experience.

Many of the titles of the works harken to self-help style phrases, like “Trusting the process.” and “It might shock you how quickly you can change your mind.” These titling conventions, sardonic as they may be, call loosely to the specific brand of assistance that is being afforded to people, the kind of pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps ideology that is cementing our collective status as being left to ourselves to figure it out. This sentiment is most-clearly seen visually in both “Fighting for scraps.” and “Everyone wants to help build the coffin.” These two pieces show two different piles of people: one working against each other, and one working together. Neither seems very productive, both feel pretty violent, and the ultimate goals are kept from the viewer, the pointlessness on full display, screaming out that there is no right answer.

The titular concept is an old one: first recorded in 1546 in a collection of proverbs by English writer John Heywood and made more famous by William Shakespeare, “even a worm will turn” is the simplified version of the expression, conveying that even the most docile of creatures will retaliate or seek revenge if pushed too far.

I saw this phrase a few years ago, on Twitter of all places. I couldn’t get it out of my head, the visuals it conjured up and the short Wikipedia article that scratched the surface of the history it held. I spent a lot of time rolling it over and over in my mind, the beautiful simplicity of the flow of the sentence in its dumbed-down state, a quiet profundity. Take from that what you will.

(Text by Peter Frederiksen, 2025)