Moss

Description

 divided 600mm circles of beehive art 

My main art practice over the last 20 years has been with formalist art assemblages involving the deconstruction and reconstruction of beehives. This art is a serious visual statement challenging the American modernist art movement ‘Abstract Expressionism’.

In American Abstract Expressionism the mark making was always carefully considered and the artists were always self aware, whereas my art work expresses the irony of using untrained naive industrial beehive painters as a basis for fine art. The weathered wood from the beehives reveal opaque and transparent paint layers that are randomly altered by the weather conditions. This painterly randomness is further developed when the beehives are dipped in wax and thrown around on trucks.

In my beehive assemblages I mediate purposely, between this naivety and the considered. Aesthetically I am recognising and celebrating the unexpected poetic beauty in the paint work. The art work quite often has a melancholic beauty characteristic of the beehive degeneration.