I’m a doll artist blending natural and man-made materials to create mythic creatures. I loved this story and the way that making a piece of art for it stretched my boundaries (and hurt my brain! ouch). Making the Empress was both very fun and very challenging. I’m fascinated with seeing the ordinary as alien and the alien as ordinary in my art and this piece is a reflection of that as well as an illustration of a most excellent and thoroughly enjoyable story told from an alien point of view.

C. Jane Washburn

When I create sculptures out of wool, I usually let the wool inspire me. Creatures take shape out of wool roving as I poke and prod the cloud of fibers with a felting needle. The craft of needle-felting uses a barbed needle (like a bee’s barbed stinger) to enmesh loose wool fibers together into a structure. The more you stab, the tighter the fibers become, the more solid the creature.

This creature had a different genesis: the story “To Set Before the King,” by Genevieve Valentine. I read Valentine’s piece as a reflection on stepmothers; in it, a pivotal time in an au pair’s life is interwoven with a fairy tale about good maids and evil stepmothers, and a cook/butcher’s reflection on her/his work to turn a carcass into food. The language is spare and beautiful, the tale as bright and sharp as a thin needle, and then as moist and smooth as breathing. Reading it, I was especially struck by Valentine’s image of a golden dress, embroidered inside with bees: “When he zips the dress closed she can feel the bees spring to life inside the dress, a thousand tiny stings.”

In the sculpture inspired by this story, I’ve taken the bee image and merged it with the butcher’s thread of the short story. A bee stands with wings folded, one arm reaching behind her back to clasp a meat cleaver. When I turn her around, I chuckle at the irony of a bee with a cleaver, rather than a stinging point.

Lisa Bergin