Bee Flowers

Artist Statement

Bee Flowers is a collaged paper quilt made of cut up silk screen prints from my series Flowers Bees Love. The original prints were made using the same five screen design and then printed with six separate color combinations each inspired by a specific flower that bees love to pollinate: Meadowsweet, Rugosa Rose, Butterfly Milkweed, Purple Cone Flower, Borage, and Lavender. To create the Bee Flowers collage, I riffed on traditional circle and square quilt patterns and used my silk screen prints that didn’t come out “perfectly,” quartered each one, and then recreated the circles in varying combinations to expand on the illusion of the kaleidoscopic mandala. 

I’m interested in making work that has magical and fantastical elements. Though not overtly political, my work addresses what is at stake. In a world where nature and science have become politicized (shall we talk about the pandemic?) and daily interaction with plants and trees and flowers and moss and lichen etc. is increasingly rare and disappearing, my work points to the importance of taking the time to slow down, notice and protect. The mirrors and kaleidoscopic elements in my work create a psychedelic component that reference the theory of the infinite (and it is a theory!) while simultaneously pointing to the fact that an infinite reserve our forests flowers, plants, trees, bees, glaciers, animals, birds, seas and air are not. It is indeed a fantasy.

Bee Flowers
“37 x 45”
collaged silk screen prints