Purpose

Material Witness will focus on extreme textile process. Images will be posted here showing the history of my work, new work, developing projects and inspiration.

Sunday, July 8, 2007

Bee's Knees

Aganetha Dyck's Wedding Dress with bee hives

Aganetha Dyck is a mixed media artist who works with textiles and bees.

She finds or makes beautiful objects with crochet and loopy textiles and introduces them into bee hives. The bees take over and collaborate to make the most exquisite objects that require incredible effort from them. They continue to build hive around the objects. sometimes they simply enhance it.

Aganetha works prolifcally and has probably been bitten and infected with bee fever. Her works are haunting and about memory. She has focused on disappearing prairie farms and has learned everything possible about things like bee pheremones, genetics and hive structure. She has introduced herself to scientists and involved herself with people like Dr. Mark Winston and Dr. David Suzuki.

Bees are disappearing at an alarming rate and wild bees are being gassed and poisoned by industrial farming techniques. Obsession with diseases like West Nile Virus have encouraged municipal governments to start spraying again.

Today we spent hours digging in our little garden and trying to prepare it for a productive year.
Gai Lan, chard and peppers are already making a decent show. Our goal is to make it edible for us , bees and others. The ladybugs are chomping away on aphids. Lots of bees are showing up.

Tonight I will fall asleep thinking Aganetha and her bees.

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