Artist and beekeeper Sarah Hatton has combined two of her passions to draw attention to a grave environmental issue facing the world’s insect population: bee colony collapse disorder.
The rise of factory farming brought with it heavy use of pesticides, which included Neonicotinoid pesticides. These are frequently employed to monocrop cultures (like corn) but have an unfortunate and serious side effect—they obliterate bees’ ability to navigate. The pesticides impair the bees’ capacities to process information, leading to a state of impaired awareness that’s analogous to experiencing hallucinations.
To draw attention to this tragedy, Hatton has created mesmerizing works of art. When she lost one of her bee colonies to natural causes, she decided to put it to good use. She dipped her expired creatures in epoxy resin and then positioned them on canvases to create optical illusions. She often employs patterns in her works that were inspired by mathematics, ancient cultures, and crop circles.
“The viewer experiences the vertigo of this lifeless swarm, a dizzying optical illusion that echoes the bee’s loss of their ability to navigate due to the toxins locked within the very source of their sustenance,” Hatton explained to The Huffington Post.
Could it bee any more appropriate?
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[via HuffingtonPost]
