Returning to where you've been

Detail of a collage, 2011.

Circuitous routes… my life is full of these paths, always circling back to a starting point I thought I had left.

This past week I’ve been considering how I started on social media with a blog called bbox productions. A way to post up pictures of my daily artworks. The bee boxes became a motif for home. As the end of this year approaches, I find myself reflecting on how all paths lead back to what is most important.

When I first moved to the northern rivers, the one thing that struck me was the elevated houses, perched on stilts like wading birds. They reminded me of old fashioned bee hives, little pointy roofs with legs. This became my first motif, a simple woodblock cut which seemed to sum up a new life for me as a visual artist.

Keeping backyard bees was the one link between our old life on our farm in country Victoria and a new life in northern NSW. The two houses merged into a bee box. I made linocuts and etchings about bee houses, and my first ever little exhibition was of etchings where I used the hive foundation as a hexagon print background.

Lat weekend we collected two new queens and their entourage from Coffs Harbour. We loaded the bee boxes into the back of the car and drove home with our precious cargo, worrying about the queens getting too hot. (Did you know queen bees become infertile after exposure to 40 degree heat for only 8 minutes?)

I felt like this was a circuitous route back to where I had started more than 10 years ago. I looked through my archive of pictures from 2008 and 2009 where I was trying to map myself into a new landscape with topographical lines, hexagon bee foundations and houses. Exploring the notion of home and what it means.

December is a time for reflection on the year that has been. Home has once again become my main focus. No longer able to travel away, creating work about home in all its forms has preoccupied my thinking and creating. While my focus has been on creating worlds of paper, I always return to the view outside my studio window. Bees are a symbol of flight away from home, yet they too, return to build a strong foundation and make honey. I’m looking forward to the first 2021 honey harvest, and a new year of possibilities.

In the Murwillumbah Weekly newspaper, January 2009.