Nicolas Aubagnac
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Beehive II
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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…
“My mind leads me to speak of forms transformed into new bodies.
O gods, you who are also responsible for these changes, inspire my undertaking and accompany a song that goes without interruption from the first origin of the world to our day.
Before the sea, the earth and the sky that covers everything existed, nature in the entire universe had only one aspect, which was called Chaos.
It was a crude and confused mass, nothing more than an inert heap, a jumble of seeds of things, of divided and poorly joined elements.”
OVID
Marie-Claire Maison
As seen in the December 2025-January 2026 issue
