Conversations with Bees

Conversations with Bees is a solo exhibition that sees Kamberri/Canberra-based artist Sammy Hawker tease at reciprocal engagements between human and more-than-human worlds. Through Hawker’s multi-disciplinary practice encompassing text, photography and moving image, the artist creates a vast and perpetual archive documenting sites and moments of exchange.

The European ritual of ‘telling the bees’, is a practice with origins in Celtic mythology, where bees are informed of recent deaths in a beekeeper’s household. If uninformed, the bees may leave the hive and follow the deceased into the afterlife.

Over the past few years Hawker has been co-creating imagery with two hives of honeybees located north-west of Ngungara/Weereewa (Lake George), an endorheic lake that periodically fills and empties of water. The photographs taken around the lake record ecologically disturbed sites and 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.