PLIGHT OF THE HONEY BEE
Sarah Hatton’s striking new works carry a warning about an epidemic killing the planet’s bees
Sarah Patton’s latest work is a comment on the problem of pesticides wiping out the
bee population and it’s making a global buzz.
Even in the fantasy land of Disney films, Bee Movie is an especially offensive assault on reality.
It goes inside a honey bee hive — a place where, in real life, the great majority of bees are female, and where females do all the work — and turns it into a male-bee’s world, where men do most of the work, and evidently are in charge.
Granted, a realistic look at male honey bees — they’re produced only as needed to mate with the queen, and summarily killed once they’ve serviced her highness — wouldn’t make much of a kids’ film. I mention it here because Disney’s distortion of reality demonstrates how little the average person knows about honey bees, and that’s especially regrettable when the bees are dying the world over. It’s a big problem for human agriculture, as honey bees pollinate many of the crops that we eat.
Two hives full of honey bees died in Chelsea, in Quebec, not far from Ottawa, early this year. Though they died of frostbite after an unseasonal cold snap, they’ve been resurrected, so to speak, to spread the alarm about Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, the name put on the epidemic killer of honey bees.
“Thousands,” says Sarah Hatton, when I ask her how many dead bees she used to make her startling, sobering new works of art. (The trio of pieces will be exhibited for one night only, Dec. 4, at Galerie St-Laurent + Hill in the ByWard Market.)
Hatton lost count as she affixed bee after bee — two entire, doomed hives of them — onto boards and then covered it all in a thick coat of resin. All summer long it was bee on board, bee on board, bee on board, every tiny corpse pulled from “a giant freezer bag full of bees” that she kept in the refrigerator of the home she shares with her husband and daughter in Chelsea.
Tedious would hardly seem a strong enough word to describe the work, but perhaps Hatton was inspired by the bees’ unshakable dedication to the job. (She says, of honey, “It takes 12 bees their entire lifespans to make one teaspoon, 100,000 trips” to the flowers and back. It’s about the same number of trips she made to that bag of bees in the freezer, one imagines.)
A bee hive is a complex ecosystem, and the three pieces Hatton created from the bodies are complex statements. They’re layered with symbolism, such as the Fibonacci spiral pattern of the piece titled Florid. The spiral is common in nature, and perhaps most often seen in the arrangement of seeds on the head of a sunflower.
At first glance, Florid seems just a round arrangement of dots, but it turns into an endless spiral that literally throws the viewer off balance. It is simultaneously attractive and destabilizing, and an allusion to the disorientation bees feel when whatever causes CCD disrupts their nervous system and makes navigation impossible; they can’t find the hive, and they die trying.
Another piece, Circle 1, is inspired by another, naturally occurring pattern seen in seashells, pine cones and elsewhere. “It implies there’s an infinity, and that every part works together for the whole,” Hatton says.
Circle 2 is inspired by crop circles, or “designs imposed on what used to be the natural order of the crops,” Hatton says.
Crop circles have mysterious origins, as does Colony Collapse Disorder, yet ultimately it’s clear to any who care to see that both circles and the disorder are man-made. The prevailing explanation for CCD is neonicotinoid pesticides, which have been banned in the European Union and are increasingly criticized in North America.
“I really do want, through art, to get that message across in a way that maybe people haven’t thought of, to reach those people who respond emotionally,” Hatton says.
Art that truly arrests the viewer must first stand on its own esthetic appeal, in this case its own beauty, before any social-political argument within is revealed.
It’s a difficult thing to make art that doesn’t sag beneath the righteous weight of its own polemic, but Hatton has succeeded in a way that’s both inspiring and mesmerizing.
All it took was a summer of endless work, and the deaths of a few thousand bees.