Artist’s Statement: Bees have many associations with death—they are sacred to Persephone and when there is a death in the beekeeper’s household they must be told and allowed to mourn. Through honey, they have associations with creativity—it is a Greek folk belief that if a bee touches the lips of a sleeping child, the child will be a singer or a poet. I wanted to keep this elegy simple and direct, so there is no voiceover, only visual text. The soundtrack was composed using the p22 text-to-music generator. Sections of the text were used to create a midi file, freely edited in Logic.
Bio: Martha McCollough was born in Detroit, Michigan. She studied visual arts at the University of Michigan and, after a period of feckless bohemianism, Pratt Institute, where she received an MFA in painting. During a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, she decided life was better not lived in New York City. So she moved to Massachusetts and is still there all these years later, living in Chelsea (which is as much like a seedy neighborhood in Queens as it’s possible to find in the Boston area), making a living as a graphic designer. She learned motion graphics on the job and gradually became more interested in videopoetry and writing than painting. Her poems have appeared in The Baffler, Cream City Review, Pine Hills Review, and Salamander, among others. Her videopoems have appeared in Triquarterly, Datableedzine, and Atticus Review and have been screened at numerous international festivals.
