A Shrine to Orpheus

The bees have been associated since antiquity with poetry and religious rites and rituals: the liminal events of birth, death and initiation. Over the past year I have collaborated with a living beehive, placing votive offerings associated with poetry into the hive.

Objects such as books, dipped and bound in beeswax and cast wax pages engraved with aphoristic poems to the bees by writer Paul Carter. These have been incorporated into honeycomb through the natural processes of the bees.

The work underlines the central role the bees play in ecological and cultural contexts, bringing together the cosmic, plant and mineral worlds in a mythic metaphor. The cultural beehive functions also as a model for spiritual renewal, cooperation and love in the tradition of a Joseph Beuys “warmth sculpture.”