nest

Description

As part of “Station” (DI 2013), I focused on the idea of context, and how meaning changes as context changes. This piece is called “Nest” and is inspired by a wasp’s nest. In 2014, I left my home of 20 years (the Bay Area) and moved to Boulder, CO. Along with my belongings, I moved a wasp’s nest that had been built on my deck in Berkeley, CA in 2005, from the wood of an Adirondack chair that I had built from a kit. The queen wasp made her
nest by scraping and collecting bits of wood fiber from my chair, weakening it with her saliva, and constructing hexagonal cells to protect her young while they developed. Once they hatched, the young constructed new cells and the colony expanded.

A nest is built, provides shelter, expands, contracts, empties, get repurposed. Its sound structure based on a pattern of repeating shapes allows the nest to remain intact, even as its story changes.