For a long time my work has had two primary threads of investigation –prime numbers and feminist utopias—both of which often merge with nature. The latter is a field with which I have been immersed and consumed for many years. Conceptually my work finds its greatest resonance with feminist utopian novels that challenge basic assumptions about power between the genders and imagine women-centered worlds in which strong and powerful women live autonomously without fear of the restrictions and consequences placed upon them by today’s society. My creation of a mythology of bee priestesses reflects my resonance with feminist utopias. Throughout the nineties my work was devoted to developing the world of the bee priestesses drawing upon imagery and materials from the honeybee society to create the work. This exploration culminated in a 14 minute digital video, Lore of the Bee Priestess, 2004, which I completed at the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada.

In this work, the Bee Priestess returns to the ancient sites seeking an essential connection to her spirit as part of an infinite continuum, but finds that it no longer exists. The piece is an odyssey about the process of self-realization that many women experience but of which there is little or no record or history and as such the piece attempts to recover submerged histories. The messages of transformation and regeneration also run throughout my work. It is my intention to suggest a culture that no longer exists on this plane but one that we might encounter through time and space and art as we sustain hope for a better world in the future.

In a large mixed media painting on wood panel, Quintessence: New Constellations, 2000, I placed the bees and imagery about them into a cosmic landscape as if they were ancient constellations to be found at a distant time in the future. In this work I created my first hive using page reinforcements in a multiplied cell-like pattern. It was the ability to create a hive of one’s own that allowed me to consider creating a universe of one’s own, which eventually led to the large format digital print series New Constellations: Feminist Utopias, 2002-6 and the  subsequent work about prime numbers. 

Drawing upon the unit cell of the honeycomb, I produced a series of diptychs and digital prints that reference the unit and the multiple, the part to the whole and asymmetrical systems of patterning and cell-division.  The Dark Matter Series, 2001 suggests the vastness of space and the fluidity/fragility of the macro/micro world.  Small vinyl reinforcements shimmer and float across a black expanse calling to mind the depth of the oceans and the vastness of space. I went on to produce two ambitious collaborative installations with mathematician Robert Valenza: Prime Deserts, 2003 and Prime Horizons, 2005. In these mixed media video installations, the form of the reinforcement –a  circle within a circle-- created the organic connection that mathematics often refers to in its highest moment of aesthetic abstraction.

My work continues to straddle these two worlds sometimes looking for ways to connect them but more often developing them separately.  To this end I have developed additional suites of digital prints (Bois d’Nirvana, 2003-4; Our Very Lives, 2004-6) and traditional prints (etchings – Namaste, 2004; Secret Garden of the Bee Priestess, 2007; Cornucopia, 2007) that extend the lore of the bee priestesses and two suites of lithographs, The First Ten Prime Numbers, (2006) that present these integers as hive clusters. In my digital print work, Through the Eyes of the Bee Priestess, 2005, a series of photographic images taken on a 24-hour photo shoot at Joshua Tree National Park for a show at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, I merged images of the landscape at dawn with images of a surveyor’s tripod and plumb bob to again create or suggest new constellations, new worlds.  Here the bee priestesses are “surveying the land” in search of the ancient ties or perhaps revealing new ones to us.  It seems that my interest in the bees, the stars and beyond continues to draw my work toward a place of transcendence and hope. 

Much of the work described here was included in my twelve year survey exhibition, Hive Universe: Nancy Macko, 1994-2006, at the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park, Los Angeles, December 2006 - February, 2007. This exhibition was the most substantive and comprehensive examination of my work to date and included my most recent video installation, Bee Stories, 2006, made specifically for this exhibition. It was accompanied by an 80-page color catalog with essays by Mary MacNaughton, Gloria Orenstein, Karin Breuer, Mary-Kay Lombino and a foreword by Connie Butler. In 2009 The Honeycomb Wall, which was featured in Hive Universe, was included in an exhibition curated by Lowery Stokes Sims, Gaia and Global Warming: Women Artists Champion Nature, at the Center for the Arts in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. In the fall of f2011, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco acquired Nirvana for Now from the Our Very Lives series to be included in the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts collection.

My most recent explorations (The Rosette Suite, Losing Count Series and Hex Memories, all created in 2009) have addressed issues of memory loss, dementia and cognitive decline –changes I witnessed as they affected my mother’s mental health as she advanced in years. Uniting a life long commitment to incorporate a spiritual respect for the world with my subject matter, I attempt to integrate aspects of aging and decline with notions of the spirit of life regardless of what point on the continuum we find ourselves. These concerns culminated in 2010 in Hopes and Dreams: A Visual Memoir. These large format digital prints will be part of When I'm 64 at the Wignall Museum September - November 2012. .

The plumb bob continues to assert and insert itself as the center of life in the Nirvana for the Future suites: The Divine Reading Lesson ( a suite of 30 unique multiple plate lithographs with hand stamping completed in 2011) and a soon-to-be completed group of digital prints that reference the heavens and the cosmos and should bring closure to the work I began in France in the fall of 2003. I am also re-visiting The Honeycomb Wall and creating a second large-scale mixed media piece, Honey Teachings, that examines the current plight of the bees and "their mysterious disapperance" and how their "plight" directly correlates with the abuse and oppression of women worldwide.