Sammy Hawker ‘Conversations with Bees’

'Conversations with Bees' evolved from research around the European ritual ‘telling the bees’, where bees are told of recent deaths in a beekeeper’s household. It is believed if the bees are not informed they might leave the hive and follow the deceased into the afterlife. It is understood the practice has its origins in Celtic mythology where bees are regarded as messengers between the natural world and the spirit realm; a portal connecting the living and the dead.

Kamberri/Canberra-based artist Sammy Hawker explores the potential of reciprocal engagements between human and more-than-human worlds. Hawker’s multi-disciplinary practice consistently embraces text, photography and moving image. These works form part of a vast and ongoing archive documenting sites and moments of exchange.

Over the past few years Hawker has been co-creating imagery with two hives of honeybees cared for by local beekeeper Oli Chiswell on Ngunawal/Ngunnawal/Gundungurra Country. These beehives live to the north-west of Ngungara/Weereewa (Lake George), an endorheic lake which periodically fills and then empties of water. Like the bees, this mercurial lake embodies a sense of existing between states.

The photographs taken around the lake are witness to ecologically disturbed sites and phenological shifts in a changing climate. Delivering them to the hive is to ‘inform’ the bees of the mass disappearance of more-than human lives in the roar of the Anthropocene. Bees play a vital role in preserving biodiversity and ecosystem health. If they followed the deceased, the consequences would be devastating.

'Conversations with Bees' asks us to expand our thinking to consider entangled non-binary answers and observe the curious paradoxes of liminal spaces. Is a bee an individual organism or an organ of the hive? Is honey an animal or plant product? Is the honeybee (as an introduced species) detrimental or beneficial to its surrounding environment? And do bees transcend boundaries between this world and the next?

Image: Sammy Hawker, Honeycomb #3, 2023, pigment inkjet print on archival cotton rag, 110 x 136cm. Image courtesy and © the artist.

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