Trish Adams’s work HOST is the result of the artist’s residency with the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) at The University of Queensland. Here she worked with Head of Visual Neuroscience Professor Mandyam Srinivasan and his colleagues in the ‘bee house’. Research scientists Carla Evangelista and Dr Peter Kraft ‘trained’ honeybees to feed from honey smeared on the palm of the artist’s bare hand. Shot in grey-scale, a scientific focus infuses the work.

While scientists might scrutinise bee behaviour to better understand their flight control and navigational memory, the artist/viewer initially is drawn to the psychological impact of such a close interaction with the bee. Yet, as Adams admits, her ‘initial vulnerability gave way to a sense of close engagement’. For the viewer, seeing the bees so magnified and in such slow motion engages our curiosity. We might marvel at their fat bodies so strangely clumsy and hesitant, imagine the flutter of wings above skin, and sense their vulnerability. We may even consider the parallels between their working lives and our own, navigating paths in environments which are fruitful, hazardous and ever challenging.

HOST builds on a body of work in which Adams has sought an interactive and collaborative engagement with science. Her doctoral project, ‘Changing Fates: an exploration of biomedical transformations’, saw her collaborating with Dr Victor Nurcombe of the School of Biomedical Sciences at The University of Queensland to produce a work that not only utilised her own cells, but also incorporated spectator involvement.HOST reflects a similar concern with cutting-edge scientific enquiry and the biological bases for interconnectivity, in this case between humans and bees.

Trish Adams gratefully acknowledges the Queensland Brain Institute’s support through her artist’s residency and particularly thanks Professor Perry Bartlett, Director and Professor Mandyam Srinivasan, Head of Visual Neuroscience, Queensland Brain Institute. Special thanks also to Visual Neuroscience researchers Carla Evangelista and Dr Peter Kraft for original cinematography and bee-training expertise. Acknowledgments also to roundhouse for video soundscape; Triny Roe for technical assistance; and Damask Perfumery for ambient aromatics.