Chance and necessity are the twin foundations of Darwinian evolution – the ultimate creativity. What artist doesn’t aspire to working with divine and cosmic forces – with the bedrock of evolution or creation? Things happen as they must – as the dance of the DNA dictates and as pure raw survival cements into place. You set up your experiment and the immutable laws of causality are set into motion.
You see before you my two interests combined: The etchings are made in the usual way, but then I insert them into the hive for bees to add the next layer. Sometimes they chew up my artwork and pitch it out of the hive alongside their excrement and dead. At other times they join forces with me to co-create. If I cover my work with a thin translucent layer of melted bee’s wax, it smells familiar and they tend to accept it. If I attach some burr comb, they seem to like that even better and often initiate work right there – adding to it or recycling it and moving it around. Let them go long enough and they’ll cover it all with capped honeycomb or perhaps they’ll chew it all up. Take it out at just the right moment and the results can be an unpredictable collaboration of sublime beauty.
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