teardrops of Ra

INFLUENTIAL ARTISTS
The contemporary Chinese artist, Ren Ri’s works
are strange collaborations with his bees. He builds
wooden frames for the bees that extend from
the centre where the queen bee resides. Ren
enjoys the instability of wax because of its ability to
change shape through temperature. He states that
the structure of the wax cells is orthohexagonal,
an inconceivable feature in the natural world, and
specific to bees (Cascone 2014).
Canadian artist, Ava Roth also collaborates
with her bees. They create honeycombs around
her embroidered hoops that are placed inside
Langstroth frames. Originally an encaustic painter
using heated beeswax and pigments, her reverence
for the beauty of the beeswax and an awareness
of CCD and the plight of bees led to a change.
Aware of the effects of climate change, Roth says
that “The idea was to celebrate the bees’ delicate
work by creating something beautiful
and hopeful together, which seems
particularly poignant at a time when
there is so much despair about the state
of our environment. My project is an
attempt to re-imagine the possibilities
of how humans interact with nature” (in
Barnes 2019).
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Fig 15. Ava Roth, Falling Horsehair, Gold #2.
Fig 14.
Ren Ri, Yuansu II.