Collaborations between artists give life to projects never seen before, but when the guests are animals, the results can be truly amazing.
Shortly after working with the encaustic painting technique, where hot beeswax is used to pigment the colors, Ava Roth discovered that she was dealing with truly talented insects. So she developed the BeeHive Collaboration project, beehive frames that hold an embroidery circle inside. Each circle is surrounded by a different construction created by the bees using 100% organic materials.
“The need to collaborate with the bees stemmed from my reverence for the beautiful material I was using along with a growing awareness of the problem of colony collapse and the plight of the honeybee.”
The goal of Ava’s work with the hives is to highlight the delicacy of the art that humans and insects can create together. This is hope within the climate emergency we are experiencing. It is a new path in which artists can re-signify and create new possibilities for the interaction between humans and ecosystems.
It was not an easy process, as Ava needed a lot of patience to understand her collaborators, the bees. She had to identify which materials they accept and which they don’t, how much time they dedicate to the work, and how much rest they take from it. She learned to listen to the bees and created an interspecies collaboration like no other.
Story originally published in Spanish in Ecoosfera
