“The whole pattern of nature is of cycles within cycles within cycles.” Medawar & Medawar 1983

Coming from a family of beekeepers, Marlène Huissoud is interested in the viability of utilising insects and their waste streams to create future craft artefacts. Of Insects & Men is particularly interested to challenge common industrial waste materials such as glass and to combine them with similar natural materials developed with the project From Insects, for example the honeybee bio resin.

Studio Marlène Huissoud has in the past experimented with a lot of traditional glass techniques using honeybee bio resin: glass blowing, venetian techniques, engraving techniques. Huissoud explains that she doesn’t see those insect materials as materials of substitution because they give new properties to the materials that already exist. Instead, she sees them as a way to challenge our way of making as the mini insect world is extraordinarily rich and has infinite potential to build a better future. The honeybee bio resin has revealed other properties that gave it unique and unexpected characteristics (eg colours, texture, facility to manipulate engraved glass).

The industrial look and feel of the honeybee bio resin brings forward questions of what is a natural material and what can be its relation to industrial waste materials. For this Edition #2 of the project From Insects, Huissoud has been collecting discarded glass pieces from different companies in London. The project is a celebration of those two discarded materials that have similarities but various properties. The honeybee bio resin is used to bind the glass pieces together in those sculptural alien look pieces. It is questioning and underlining the way of how we use materials nowadays and in the future. It is as well questioning how two waste materials, natural and industrial can complement each other perfectly, giving us an up-cycling approach as it’s crucial to re-orientate ourselves to the natural world and find new ways of generating cycles in our making process.

The honeybee bio resin and the glass pieces are very ambiguous, as they have a similar aesthetic but a different provenance. Of Insects & Men question us what is natural and what it is not, what is fake or real, testing our knowledges of materiality, a visual perception of materials and a textural vibrance.

Of Insects & Men tells the greater discarded beauties that surround us and celebrate the cycles of material interactions, a rhythm in the process of making where industrial meets natural.