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In Ava Roth’s sculpture practice, a finished piece is the result of careful planning and tending, but the outcome can only be predicted so much. Whether creating wooden frameworks or organic embroideries, the artist leaves it to bees to create the ultimate form.

Roth has long invited the honeycomb-building insects to play a role in her work, often adding wonderfully bulbous constructions that occasionally disrupt the artist’s carefully placed boundaries. Wooden pieces are mandala-like and take on the quality of low reliefs once the bees have done their part. Recently, she leapt into the three-dimensional realm via ceramics and a time-honored tradition of repair in her series Kintsu-Bee.

The new body of work is a play on the Japanese word kintsugi, which describes a traditional method of repairing ceramics with metallic lacquer. The process embraces the nature of the breakage itself, mending the vessel yet highlighting the cracks as a way of embracing the object’s history rather than trying to camouflage it. In Roth’s iteration, bees are invited to reconstruct the missing parts, guided around forms to create the missing handle of a mug or fill in the fissures of a dinner plate.

“Mirroring the philosophy of kintsugi, the unique architecture of the comb acts both as a restorative measure and as a visual memory of the past,” says a statement. “When extracted, the delicacy and complexity of the composite objects—half human and half insect—tell a story not just of human violence but of the earth’s capacity for repair.”

See more on Roth’s Instagram.

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