Nicolas Aubagnac
Collections
Beehive I
_tapestry
1 / 5
nature inspires
I created this tapestry from a piece of wild beehive that I found during a walk near Bergerac, under a centuries-old oak tree…
The object itself raises questions. It was my father who told me:
«"But Nicolas, it's a beehive!"»
What caught my attention was that such complex shapes could be concentrated on such a small object in an ultra-sophisticated composition.
I wanted to translate this form onto a much larger scale and choose a medium that could be compared to that of bees who build their honeycombs by juxtaposing billions of wax threads…
Tapestry became the obvious choice, and I opted for a jacquard weave, that is to say, a mechanical one, because I find it interesting to entrust the construction and interpretation of the original document to a mechanical process, accepting the element of chance it contains and the poetry that can emerge from it. It's not every day you associate machines with poetry!
And so my beehive has become this "object" floating in the textile space like a mysterious meteorite levitating between strength and poetry.
One tapestry can hide another…
On the reverse side of each tapestry, I had the first verses of Ovid's Latin poem, Metamorphoses, woven…
“I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms.
You, gods, since you are the ones who alter these, and all other things, inspire my attempt, and spin out a continuous thread of words, from the world's first origins to my own time.
Before there was earth or sea or the sky that covers everything, Nature appeared the same throughout the whole world: what we call chaos:
a raw confused mass, nothing but inert matter, badly combined discordant atoms of things, confused in the one place.”
OVID
Marie-Claire Maison
As seen in the December 2025-January 2026 issue
