Ava Roth's Kintsu-Bee Series Enlists Bees to Repair Ceramics

Artist Ava Roth has long collaborated with honeybees, letting them build organic honeycomb structures on her wooden frameworks. Her new series, Kintsu-Bee, extends this practice into ceramics, drawing on the Japanese tradition of kintsugi—repairing broken pottery with metallic lacquer to celebrate flaws. Roth guides bees to reconstruct missing parts of ceramic vessels, such as handles or fissures, creating hybrid objects that are half human-made, half insect-made. The honeycomb serves both as a restorative measure and a visual memory of the past, telling a story of human violence and the earth's capacity for repair.