Vespiary - Renewed

1. a wasps’ nest.
2. a community or colony of wasps.

The paper wasp nest started to fall apart and the babies lay strewn about a workspace. What better way to re-colonize the nest than by filling it with plastic “Caucasians” and giant insects from another continent as overseers? Though the pun is only newly intended, it seemed a natural pairing.

The objects we use to represent our human selves fascinate me, especially when they are manufactured from molds and found in multiples on a store shelf. While the tiny pink babies are used as good fortune charms in Lenten celebrations to represent a baby Jesus in Mardi Gras celebrations, I first encountered them in a large jar on a store counter.

As my collection of smaller and larger “King” babies grew, I found other babies assigned gender by diaper colors. I assigned a narrative to their existence. Might we one day discover tiny humans buried in polar ice that come alive after their shelter is melted? Those embryos are frozen futures. Archaelogists have uncovered perfectly preserved pasts in ice. Many kinds of desert life only come into existence when it rains. What if? Did we learn to qualify ourselves as industrious because we mimicked the social structure of insects?