Chris Campbell

Lives and works in Orlando, FL

Artist statement

My practice is a thousand sculptures long. The Hive series is a durational project: one thousand numbered works, each holding as many bees as its number, building toward a final museum-scale piece I call the Crown. A colony built the way colonies build, one worker at a time. A labor performed the way labor is performed, by hand, over years. The work begins where development ends the wild. Across Florida, wetlands are drained for subdivisions maintained by invisible workforces, and the colony, nature's original labor force, moves into the structures that replaced its habitat. I build dimensional grounds from foam and resin-coated canvas, ink engraving-style linework directly onto the surface, and let honeycomb rupture through. Flora reads as architecture, a bee's-eye view where flowers become skyscrapers. Hand-positioned silver and gold-plated bees occupy these built worlds. Not painted, but placed, like workers on a site. The colony mirrors our own systems: who labors, who is served, who is displaced when the ground shifts. The bees are both subject and witness. Nature not as decoration but as a workforce reclaiming the built environment, and time as the real subject. Everything we build is temporary. The hive is what moves in after.

Artwork