Flat Swarm (200)

2026

Charcoal on paper

215 × 150cm

I think of a bee swarm as an experience. It is immersive and spatial, constantly moving, growing, shrinking, dispersing; it is a sum of its conscious, living parts. Flattening the swarm in a drawing removes this depth and movement, turning an experience, unnaturally, into a surface. This flat version rids itself of the possibility of movement, of change and chance, of all the things that are inherent in its nature as a swarm. Each bee in the swarm exists as its own object, but all bees come together to portray a collective where no single point dominates and attention is continually redistributed. The swarm is flattened, not collapsed; each bee becomes an indicator of the space that suspends the swarm. This becomes a visual enquiry, a sort of pursuit for attention, where each drawn object attempts to reconcile the pull between solitary and collective structure, without allowing either to fully resolve.