Pieced together, collaged, dissembled to be realigned and combined, Ava Roth’s practice highlights the beauty of nature, evoking the repetitive, highly-structured, organic shapes of the beehive. The multimedia artist employs encaustic, embroidery, and collage that is frequently defined by and intermingled with honeycomb or beeswax from local honeybees. In works like “Tulip Leaf,” Roth celebrates these forms, the combination of organic and linear, in purposeful juxtaposition to the common despair and fear about the climate crisis. 

The artist’s “return to nature” mentality draws the eye to the local. Roth utilizes natural and found materials from her local environment in Canada. Her collaborations with honeybees takes this approach even further. “Magnolia Leaf” places Roth’s delicately-drawn encaustic within the recurring hexagons of the honeycomb, breaking through the almost monotonous repetition with the rounded magnolia leaf and rectangle paper covered in multicolored dots. As seen here, “Porcupine Quills” demonstrates how the honeybees contribute to her project, covering the honeycomb surrounding the titular quills. The lines of the honeybees' bodies parallel the stripes of the porcupine quills, one being visually echoing another. The presence of the bees also invokes a multi-sensory experience, perhaps a memory of buzzing bees in a field or on a playground coming to the viewer’s mind as they perceive and admire Roth’s work.

Roth’s practice frequently engages multiple senses simultaneously. Her collages meld paper and other materials like the thread-like pieces in “Horse Hair.” Her encaustic paintings of landscapes are fragmented by lines, cracks across the meticulously rendered mirror surface in “Lake Horizon.” The materials demanded attention, jutting out or branching off from the two-dimensional surface into the viewer’s space. Viewed in person or virtually, Roth’s works are visceral, a play for the eye as much as making the viewer wish to reach out and touch, to wonder what the various textures would feel like. In this way and throughout her practice, Roth celebrates the tactility and the multifacetedness of the natural world. 

- the Editors

I am a Toronto-based encaustic painter, embroiderer and mixed-media artist. Beeswax is the cornerstone of my practice, and I have spent the past several years developing an inter-species collaboration with local honey bees. This work begins in my studio with the creation of encaustic collages, made almost exclusively of natural materials. Delicate substances such as birch bark, pine needles and burr comb are worked with thread and attached to tissue, dipped in wax and suspended in embroidery hoops. The hoops are then fixed to custom-made Langstroth hive frames, and placed inside honeybee hives where thousands of bees embed the pieces in raw honeycomb.

In addition to the bee collaboration, I have developed a body of work on wood panel and paper, with beeswax as the primary medium. Natural ephemera foraged from woods and beaches are sewn, woven, and gilded in gold leaf. Preserved leaves and cones are dissected and reassembled, often laminated in beeswax and suspended by branches or in embroidery hoops. Landscape photography is dredged through beeswax and embroidered before being fixed to organic substrates with leather or copper sutures.

At its essence, my work explores the boundaries of where humans collide with the natural environment, both imagining and suggesting a more beautiful outcome of this encounter. My offering is essentially hopeful at a time when we are overwhelmed with despair at the state of the climate, and our role in its destruction.

 I am represented by Wallspace Gallery, in Ottawa. In addition to exhibiting in both solo and group shows, my work has been featured in a multitude of on-line and print magazines. My pieces have been acquired by private collectors throughout Canada and internationally.