By creating imaginative and poetic sculptures and structures, Anne Marie Maes explores the interaction between nature and culture through the lens of art, material science and biology.

The Guerilla Beehive is a mobile and recyclable shelter for swarming bee colonies. The hive is easily deployable in urban situations and it supports the homeless colonies in a natural and sustainable way. It is not a beehive for honey production, but it aims to support the bee colonies as pollinators and guardians of biodiversity.

The Guerilla Beehive can be used as a sensing device for monitoring the status of the environment by observing the behaviour of the colonyThe biomimetic design (inspired by a pollen grain of the Fragaria vesca) is shaped upon the needs of the bees: it has the ideal inner volume for a developing colony to live in the wild, it is mobile and it is entirely made of organic and recycable materials. The Guerrilla Beehive can be seen as an autonomous artwork intending to give a stunning aesthetic experience. Anne Marie Maes recently founded the ‘Laboratory for Form and Matter’ to study raw materials collected by the bees. Her experiments on form and matter have been brought together in the section named 'the Raw and the Cooked'. She experiments with a range of organic components and measures their usability for art installations and design applications, as -amongst others- the Guerilla Beehive. At the basis of the experiments are different beehive components as propolis, wax and pollen, along with living systems as fungi and bacteria to create new fabrics grown by nature. In the laboratorium section 'the Raw and the Cooked' Anne Marie Maes tests the publics' knowledge of visual perception and smells of a range of materials. She shows the different cycles of material interactions that form a rhythm in the process of making where the arts meet nature.

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