Allison Barnes: Neither For Me Honey Nor The Honey Bee at VCP

The landscape in which identity is grounded is made out of memory and desire, of shifting gestures that point towards what has happened and what will happen. There are places that make us and by some means we make them. The ways in which we value and use the natural world show how our own histories become aligned with the history of a site. Neither For Me Honey Nor the Honey Bee spans the terrains of personal geographies, exploring Place as it exists in our contemporary lives, as depicted through encounters, collections and details. In a sense, Honey Bee is made up of its own fragments that have been strung together to create a portrait of intimacy and place. However, the viewer is welcome to pursue his or her own narratives within the prints, which shift in their collection and sequence during each installment – an element that alters that manner in which the work can be interpreted. The title, Neither For Me Honey Nor the Honey Bee, is the remaining fragment of a composition by Ancient Greek poet Sappho (630 BCE – 570 BCE), which means taking good without evil. It also refers to the various connections between the honeybee and the landscape, which reappear throughout this work. Bees navigate the landscape, gather up its life, bring it home and transform it. The experience of one landscape and the perception of another are both physical, and this series is about finding those moments that are in some way about extending the boundaries of the self into a landscape that we already know so well.

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