Ommatidia Finished

I shared earlier this week the process that went into making my giant bee head quilt and today I'm back to share the final piece.

The outside is covered wtih foss shape and it was really great to scuplt with.  It was fun to stretch and heat and staple and pad until I got it to a shape I liked.  It's hard to tell but the eye sockets have some depth along the outer edges and the whole thing is taut and stiff.  I love the eyebrows that sort of got unexpectedly incorporated as I was dealing with excess fossshape.

Ommatidia, c. Shannon Conley, 2025, 32x32x14

I really love the way it turned out, in particular the rainbow of colors in the eyes (the ommatidia) against the white of the main face.

I love the color movement in the test tubes across the surface of each eye.

Here you can see the ridges around the eye socket and the eyebrow a bit better.

One challenge is that the proboscis sticks down below the internal structure which means it can't sit flat upright on a table.  It has to either sit upside down (on top of its head) or flat on its back.  It turns out to be 26 pounds which is quite heavy, but I got a french cleat and it hangs fine from that. 

For a while after I hung it up with the french cleat I wasn't 100% sure whether it would stay on the wall so I moved a big soft dog bed under it.  At first I kept the dogs off (lest a large bee sculpture fall on them) but after a while it seemed stable so Blue joined the picture. 

The piece is currently on display (along with several others of mine) in a mixed media exhibition at the Capitol Rotunda Gallery at the New Mexico State Capitol.  The lighting techs for the show did the most amazing job I've ever seen- somehow they managed to light the bee head so that the shadows it casts look like wings and body.  I could never have expected something so awesome.  If you happen to be in the Santa Fe area (through December 21, 2026), stop by the capitol and see the show. 

We've all been joking that the bee is silently judging everyone who walks by.

 

New Art Quilt: Ommatidia

A few years ago when we were cleaning out some old labs in preparation for moving to some new ones, I brought home a bunch of lab consumables that were going to be tossed. A bunch of the 1ml serological pipettes made their way into this piece  but I still have a lot of would-have-been-trashed supplies.  This included three boxes of small (~5" long) glass test tubes I'd just been waiting for the perfect project.

When the SAQA call for pollinators came out, I decided I wanted to do something inspired by the compound eyes of bees.  Compound eyes feature thousands of little individual focusing units rather than a retina made up of millions of cells with a single cornea/lens in front of it.  Each of these individual focusing units is called an ommatidia.  

In the end, the piece didn't get into the Pollinators show, but it was so much fun to work on, I'm thrilled to have done it.

I got out all 750 test tubes, and covered them individually in a rainbow of fabrics from my stash.  Each one is like a little sleeve (or test tube condom).  I used silks, hand-dyes, polyesters, prints, lots and lots of mens ties, and other random shiny scraps I had sitting around.  Getting them all sewn and turn and stuffed with a test tube was a good mindless task and I only broke a few.

They're all the same size, they just look different because of the panorama picture.

I decided to sew them on two different pieces of quilt sandwich (with fosshape instead of bating) in the shape of an oval eye, with the test tubes sewn on in rows.  Each little sleeve had a couple of inches of extra fabric below the glass, so I just snugged my free motion foot up as close to the glass as possible to sew them down in rows.

They were pretty floppy- this was one of the "eyes" after I'd sewn down all the test tubes, and it was pretty fun to flop them back and forth.

To make the eyes protrude a little, I put a bundle of chicken wire behind each eye and then stiffened the fossshape around it.

Then to make the test tubes flop a little bit less, I stitched down this flexible edging stuff I bought at lowes a long time ago and figured I'd use for something sometime.

I mounted each of the eyes to a piece of plywood to have shape and then connected them with a hinge, so it would look like eyes looking out of the side of a face.

To start shaping the face around the eyes and cover up the silly navy blue floral print, I quilted a large piece of foss shape and draped it over the whole sculpture.  By cutting out eye holes, stuffing paper under the fabric, trimming the plywood a bit, and then stiffening the fosshape I sculpted the bee head shape.

This was a super fun project, delightful to work on and fun to problem solve on.  I love the kind of project where you have an idea and have to make up how to accomplish it as you go along!  It's so fun to use unconventional and "rescued" materials.  I still have a bunch of test tubes left (they're a different size) so I'm sure they'll appear in another project going forward!

Come back on Wednesday to see the final piece.