Implementing a wide variety of industrial materials, this tableau of ten figures is a meditation on an individual’s relationship to its home or the physical circumstances it might call home. The eighteenth-century idea of sublime nature, beautiful in form and menacing in action, is supplanted by an altered nature made menacing by the unrelenting consistency of our own actions. These sculpture’s anthropomorphized whimsical image in popular culture is in direct contrast to their physiology and morphology as intricately evolved beings in a complex web of life.

At first glance, the figures are a bee and honeycomb, an ant and hill, a termite and wood, a moth and a cocoon and a snail and a shell. On closer examination, their storybook image is slightly skewed. The skins of the five characters are transposed into material states that suggest other orders of being. For instance, the story of the busy bee opposes current scientific findings of colony collapse syndrome that we can understand as the results of our intervention in the bee’s complex set of social and material relationships. This is visually and physically conveyed through rendering the creature in industrial materials, the blue urethane honeycomb and red hairy pop art patterning on the bee’s wax of the bee are extraordinary. Each intervention materially and energetically suggests that there is another emergent order of existence that is contrary to the one we think we know.

The materials that are out of place, that are removed from their natural cycles of deterioration and regeneration are what we call pollution. Arguably most of the change is what we don’t see, or are not aware of because it happens slowly and out or our view. Honeybee colony collapse has not affected us yet and is not something we can see happening but will have worldwide environmental ramifications, as it escalates. Through the exhibition of Being and Home, it is my hope to visually raise awareness about how our use of materials impacts the planet and the growing need to be educated toward conservation measures. Being and Home is considered one artwork and has been installed on a wall that is 27’ wide and 16’ high. As a field of figures, their presence and position are measured as much by their stories as by the energetic qualities of their materiality.