The most beautiful thing I leave behind is the light of the sun;
second, the shining stars and the moon’s face;
but also ripe cucumbers, apples and pears.
from Hymn to Adonis by Praxilla of Sicyon, fifth century BCE
Praxilla, My Bumblebee Queen!
2016 - 2017
Commissioned by The University of Texas at Austin. Presented in Omnibus Filing, an exhibition at the Visual Arts Center, UT Austin. Curated by James Sham and Dr Brian Korgel.
This is a mausoleum for a single bumblebee queen.
Praxilla, named after the fifth century BCE Greek poet Praxilla of Sicyon, is an American bumblebee, Bombus pensylvanicus, item #00146801 in the entomology collection of UT Austin. She is inside a glass enclosure made by Adam Kennedy and Shallaco McDonald at the scientific glass laboratories of the UT Chemistry Department.
A piece of aerogel accompanies Praxilla in her glass vessel. Aerogel is an extremely porous material that is almost as light and airy as a piece of sky. It is 99.8 per cent air and was used in NASA’s 2006 Comet Sample Return Mission, on the Stardust Spacecraft, to capture interstellar dust and comet particles from Comet Wild 2.
Dr Shalene Jha, an evolutionary biologist at the Department of Integrated Biology, UT Austin, presents the scientific knowledge related to Praxilla in a single channel video.
A second video, on the opposite wall of the mausoleum, shows a recitation of the only surviving three-line fragment from Hymn to Adonis by Praxilla of Sicyon, interspersed with translation and commentaries of the text by Dr Stephen White, Professor of Classics and Philosophy at UT Austin. My voice echoes the recitation lead by Evelyn Richardson, PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago.
The mausoleum includes fresco paintings, 24 cupcakes in a container with pain-killers and poisonous dry pigments, disposable rubber gloves used by the installers of the exhibition, and a close-up photograph of Praxilla taken by Alex Wild, a curator of the entomological collection at UT Austin.
Materials: Bumblebee queen, aerogel, glass enclosure, fresco, cupcakes, painkillers, dry pigments, close up photograph of bumblebee queen, interviews, two single channel videos. Location: Department of Integrated Biology, UT Austin.
