My first installation, made for a group show at the Manor of Art at Milepost 5 in Portland, August 14-23, 2009. Before it became studio space, the building had been a senior care facility left empty for years. Artists were each given a room, bathroom, or hallway to convert. The space was filthy and smelled bad when I walked in, and I’m sensitive to smell, so the material decision came first: I coated the walls in lazure technique using a beeswax-based glaze I custom-tinted in blue and purple. Then, with a team of interns, I made hundreds of wax flowers, dipped by hand and wired into the walls in drifts, alongside encaustic paintings – the first I’d made in that medium. On a shelf nearby sat a small series of wire-and-wax sculptures, black bases with delicate stemmed forms rising out of them, each one titled and numbered.
I wanted the room to hold together as something factual, not just decorative, so I pinned bee facts to the entry like specimens in a natural history case. At the center of the room sat a beehive – I was keeping bees at the time – with a microscope on top holding a single dead bee to look at up close. A hive smoker sat on the windowsill alongside a wild beeswax comb. One intern also built a video showing how bees see color and pattern differently than we do, and I modified 28 pairs of 3D glasses with photo film lenses so visitors could try it themselves: instructions on the wall walked them through noticing the shift into blues and greens, then the contrast and pattern a bee would pick up on. Each pair was nestled in its own cell in a beeswax-covered honeycomb, waiting to be returned after use.
See was where I started asking a question that’s shaped everything since: what happens when someone steps into a space built to be looked at closely, from multiple angles, at once. Spiral and Untangled both grew out of that same interest in watching people experience a piece in real time.
