Ena Grozdanić
“Taarn Scott: Somewhere Between Abundance”

The native bee, unlike the introduced honeybee, does not commonly hive. It burrows in soft surfaces across the continent; in porous sandstone, clay soils, hollow wood. It nests among leaves, fronds of trees, gaps in mortar. Concrete, in the way that it seals a city, is not conducive to the burrow; thus, not conducive to the native bee, whose habitat needs to yield to the touch, crumble when dug, hold a provision of cavities. This is all to say, the native bee requires world-building that is adaptive and tender.

There are over 1,700 species of native bees on this continent and, with the exception of a few, most live in solitary or semi-social formations. This should not lead to a conclusion of separateness: rather than isolated, singular forms, burrows zigzag through industrial and natural terrain, an intricate network webbed across burls and aging bricks and desert sands. In Taarn Scott’s ceramic sculptures, the burrow is re-imagined as a luminous environment, the result of a home-making impulse rather than a mere survival instinct. The colours of Scott’s burrows recall the earth’s strata and sediments; umber, sienna, taupe, punctuated with unexpected splashes of blue. To re-imagine is also to remind, and Scott reminds us of the possibility of an alternative present: how would a city feel, if it was open to diverse lifeworlds and ecosystems? If it was attuned to the needs of both insect and mammal?

The land underneath West Space is a basalt plain, created by lava cooled to magma several million years ago. A couple of kilometres to the east, by Merri Creek, a strata of sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone is the remnant of a seabed from four hundred million years ago. The Birrarung/Yarra River, which curves and cuts across the city, carries a high clay deposit, and due to the clay’s unusual disc-shape, the river reflects a high proportion of sunlight, giving it its opaque, golden appearance.1 Scott’s burrows speak to the beauty and abundance of this terrain, then conjure more associations—the glow of grass trees at dusk, scrub speckled with lichen, light as it refracts across waves, quartz fragments in streams. Scott, who lives and works in Aotearoa, has been translating ideas around habitat and geographical histories into tactile objects for the past three years. Aotearoa has 28 species of native bee, which nest in bare, undisturbed soils. Viewing Scott’s burrows connected via chain-filaments to each other, one feels a surge of appreciation for the tenacity of this particular lifeworld: for the bees, for their burrows, their nests, their hives, and the way they forage for nectar to produce and reproduce the world through every season.

In Beekeeping in the End Times2, anthropologist Larisa Jašarević highlights that climate action is not just a technical issue, rather it requires an intervention in all domains of social life, in all aspects of human experience. Climate catastrophe will impoverish the world across material and psychic planes, thus it should be confronted via science as well as storytelling. Last year, this continent’s sea surface temperatures were the warmest on record, 0.89°C above average. On the central, southern tip of the continent, the marine heatwave combined with drought has contributed to an algal bloom that has flourished in still, warm waters. The coastline has been besieged with death. Sharks, rays, and fish are washing up across beaches; clusters of dead cuttlefish are floating in the water. How do we maintain hope that we can prevent future iterations of such unravelling? How do we honour our obligation to sustain life through the destructiveness of this late colonial capitalocene?

In her decade-long observation of bees and apiculture, Jašarević has positioned the bee as a model of gentle steadfastness. Bees know how to live well, she writes, because they gently tend to damaged landscapes. Jašarević retells a story that has been passed down by generations of beekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which enters high circulation during times of emergency.

Two angels in the near heavens open their eyes once every hundred years. “Are the bees still swarming?” they ask.

Their fellow angels who monitor Earth respond: “The bees are still swarming.”

“What about the sheep? Are they still lambing?”

“The sheep are still lambing.”

“And the fish? Are they still spawning?”

“The fish are still spawning.”

“Well, then, the End is not just yet.”

The point of this story, I think, is that we have more time: and more time renews our obligation for struggle. A hundred years signals the requirement of nurturing both patience and urgency as affective tools to confront the forces of annihilation. It enlivens the idea that there is indeed sufficient time to rebuild worlds that are adaptive and tender, that are sensitive to the minutiae of life in all its forms. We sit somewhere between devastating loss and abundance; all is yet to be determined. A hundred years is not much, but it is not nothing.

Commissioned to accompany Somewhere Between Abundance in the West Space Window, 31 May → 5 July 2025.