This captivating experimental video is a visual narrative of the lost history of the ancient bee priestesses –an ancient, long dead matriarchal culture-- evokes aspects of utopia, feminism and spirituality: values that I believe are crucial to awaken and sustain in contemporary times.  It is a piece created to evoke the spirit of a feminine odyssey, autonomy and transformation for which the bee priestess functions as the metaphor. The piece imagines an odyssey of spiritual transformation of the Bee Priestess…from the hive to the heavens -- re-imagined as a symbol of the sacred feminine, which is the Light. 

For the last 12 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. During this time, I traveled to Spain, Romania, and Greece documenting artifacts that corroborate the existence of these ancient women's cultures and in search of evidence substantiating the honeybee as an integral part of their world. 

As the Bee Priestess returns to the ancient sites seeking the essential connection to her spirit as part of an infinite continuum, she finds that it no longer exists. This piece is about her odyssey as she discovers and defines her autonomy and independence and, at the same time, re-connects to this ‘original’ history. This is an odyssey about the process of self-realization that many women experience but of which there is little or no record or history and as such the piece attempts to recover submerged histories. 

The messages of transformation and regeneration are both visual and aural incorporating original footage and sound from locations around the world. It is my intention to suggest a culture that no longer exists on this plane but one that we might connect to through time and space and art as we sustain hope for a better world in the future. In this way the piece depicts the end of patriarchal time --perhaps the end of time as we know it and as Donna Haraway describes it in “A Cyborg Manifesto”-- or the beginning of an altogether new kind of time. 

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, at best a fragmented sense of representation in the world and a profound lack of true historical presence. Invoking a strategy that many artists who experience this same sense of alienation and absence of presence use, I chose to create the history that is missing or inaccessible. 

The piece includes video footage of performances I did as the Bee Priestess in Spain, Greece and Romania as well as flamenco dancing, beekeeping and plumb bobs. The audio portion of the piece includes many sounds, among them: bees humming; birds singing; wings flapping; flamenco and tap dancing; frame drumming and original digital music; and bhramari pranayama –a humming form of yoga breathing.

 I began development of this piece in 1992 and continued to research and film from that time until 2004. I completed the post-production on this piece during an artist residency at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada in the summer of 2004. Much gratitude to my partner Jan Blair, lead camera and videographer; Annabelle Kent, lead video editor; and Shawn Everett, lead sound editor, without whom this piece could not have manifested.