In a world where the future is now envisioned through the lens of Katherine Hayle’s post-humanity or Donna Haraway’s cyborg, one finds solace and hope from the visions of writers working within the genre often referred to as feminist utopia. Authors Nicola Griffith (Ammonite), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland), Marge Piercy (He, She and It; Woman on the Edge of Time), Dorothy Bryant (The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You) and Suze McKee Charnas (The Holdfast Chronicles) challenge basic assumptions about power between the genders and imagine women-centered worlds in which strong and powerful women live autonomously without fear of the restrictions and consequences placed upon them by today’s society. As part of this utopia, other authors, like Octavia Butler (Xenogenesis Trilogy) and Orson Scott Card (The Ender Series), respond to and re-shape our notions of technology and our relationship to it by imagining a more humane co-existence between human and machine in worlds that mediate the cold spectre of Hayle and Haraway.

My own insatiable quest to establish the existence of ancient matriarchal cultures, mirrors much of what many people experience today –an invisibility of all but the dominant culture, a fragmented at best sense of representation in the world and a profound lack of true historical presence. Invoking a strategy that these writers and other artists who experience this same sense of alienation and absence of presence use, I chose to create the history that is missing or inaccessible. For the last 10 years I have been making work that places the honeybee society with all its intrinsic metaphors at the center of my exploration creating a utopia of Bee Priestesses where worker bees are female, priestesses of the Goddess are Melissae, and Demeter is the pure Mother Bee.

In 2000 I created a body of work, Quintessence: New Constellations, in which the metaphor shifted: rising to the heavens, the bees became starsand constellations that lead us into a new and uncharted future. This work addressed the simultaneous shift of several fundamental paradigms: the establishment of true equity among genders; the re-discovery of and responsibility for nature through technology; and the recognition and integration of the archaic, feminine past into the global network of the future. Using traditional and digital art processes, to create Feminist Utopias, I am creating new constellations that not only mark our past but also guide our future. These stars may well represent the worlds of earlier times when life was more even and balanced. By bringing images from the ancient past into the cosmology of a future we have yet to discover, I, like these wonderful writers, am imagining adifferent ending –in fact, a new beginning--to the dominant narrative.

This new work fuses images of the cosmos and astro-phenomena with images that reference women’s power and wisdom to create new constellations. By doing so, I am attempting to uncoverthe ancient past and thereby remember the original connections between the natural world and technology, and science and art. These works are realized as large format digital prints.