Preview
Creation Date
2024
Dimensions
Dimensions Variable
Materials
Wood boxes, bee comb, and paper flowers
Medium
Installation
Project Advisor
Tony Conrad
Year of Graduation
2024
Rights
Copyright for this work is held by the artist.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Keywords
Domesticated, Honeybees
Artist Statement
This exhibition is inspired by my passion for honeybees. They are highly misunderstood creatures and have been overlooked as one of the core reasons why humans and everything else are able to exist. As a naturalist, this work is not just a pedestal for the “Save the Bees” movement, but also the building block of who I am as a biologist and an artist. This work represents growth, change, strength, and beauty.
Beginning with my bee boxes, I crack them open to signify the mind and world in which I worked. Growing from the hives are paper flowers representing not only the beauty of the bee’s labor and their importance to our existence, but also how I too blossomed through creating the work you see before you. As a bee is found on its comb, the bees are mounted on comb-shaped plywood coated in beeswax, so as the audience approaches the sweet smell of honey will hit the senses. From here, there are five drawings of a bee rendered in different two-dimensional media. What ties all these two-dimensional works together is that at their core, at the bones of each rendering, is the original graphite bee. The repetitiveness of the bees themselves is also of importance. For a queen to run a hive, there needs to be a colony full of worker bees. These female bees are arguably the most important as they bring food in, regulate the hive’s temperature, protect the hive, and keep the queen alive.
I’ve gone through so much in my life that has made me into the person I am today, and I’ve changed and grown through it all. No matter how hard things may have been, one thing has been constant, and that has been my love for the art of the natural world and these little honeybees that inhabit it. Honeybees have become such a huge part of my life and have changed it in more ways than one. This work is a physical representation of my growth through art, the connection I made with the world of bees, the strength they taught me, and how both passions have helped me get to where I am today.