Catherine Chalmers, Antworks in Progress (2012), taken during the production of Antworks (all images courtesy the artist)

What is This? Artwork for Ants?

“Our culture is far richer with the inclusion of other life forms,” says Catherine Chalmers, an artist who collaborates with a collective of wild ants to create tiny, Abstract Expressionist “Antworks.”

Rhea Nayyar September 27, 2023 on Hyperallergic

While most people do everything they can to keep their homes free of pests like mice, roaches, and ants, artist Catherine Chalmers welcomes them as collaborators in her art practice. Chalmers works with these disliked but ecologically essential organisms in an effort to broaden the horizons of our anthropocentric existence. In her research-based, multidisciplinary project Antworks, Chalmers worked with Leafcutter ants in the Costa Rican rainforest, investigating their aesthetic sensibilities through the plants they choose to trim and take back to their underground colonies in order to cultivate their food source — fungus.

With nearly a decade of onsite research into Costa Rican ant colonies under her belt, Chalmers told Hyperallergic in an interview that she has “always had a sensitivity to the non-human world.” She said shegravitated toward entomology because insects are critical to the ecosystem, and their behaviors are very non-mammalian and unfamiliar to us. “They eat their lovers, they’re born in a fig and never leave, they just do all these weird things that are so beyond our perspective,” she continued. “And because we hate them.”

Read the full article on Hyperallergic here