Sometimes you do not find story on the page, but by the mere glance at an astonishing object. This striped anthropod greeted my morning…
…and by the afternoon, I had crossed the expanse of the bay, tarried down a lane, entered what seemed to be an ordinary clapboard house, and encountered this shiver.
This beauty sent a shiver up my spine straight into my brain. That shiver hovered there between my flight instinct and my imagination daring not to choose. The arachnid (armed with needle and silk thread) is the creation of Mike Libby of Insect Lab.
Mark and I had the glory of seeing the workspace where Mike transforms the structure of deceased anthropods shipped to him from afar into works of exquisite clockwork using the gears and widgets of time pieces past.
We witnessed a beetle’s bustling transformation…
…and the marvels of finished creatures ready to move into their glass domes…
Our pictures hardy do justice to these creations. You should explore them in the Insect Lab Gallery. It is always an honor to explore an artist’s space from widgets, to skeletal scribbles on the desk leg, to stray wings and grasshopper leg on the workstation, and to the children’s books that speak to the Insect Lab mindset…
We talked long and hard about how Insect Lab’s creations do not have a back story and how Mike has resisted any association with existing (and tempting) stories. Instead, Mike hopes to inspire story with his anthropod beauties. How? That is another story.
What might E.O Wilson say? You really ought to get him together with Mike on ants.