Borrowed Words & Common Thoughts was created in response to an invitation to make new work in dialogue with Karl Lagerfeld's private library of 33,000 books. The project unfolds in two parts around the playfulness and power of words. The first traces a path through familiar landmarks of 20th-century American photography — the gay iconography of Robert Mapplethorpe, an anthology of post-industrial landscapes, a report on the aftermath of the Great Depression — before turning to Richard Avedon and James Baldwin's Nothing Personal in search of a more inclusive vantage point. Working more from the words than the images, Coco excavates titles, phrases and page designs from these books, borrowing and reappropriating them into paintings that mimic their original typefaces and formal presentation. In the exhibition's second half, her own handwriting emerges on the canvas, giving way to personal reflections on the dichotomy of the world and her own capacity for procrastination. Entered with no particular goal in mind and guided by chance, instinct and surprise, the project stands as both a tribute to the authors and artists encountered along the way and a meditation on the generative power of curiosity itself.