Ava Roth is a Toronto-based encaustic painter, embroiderer and mixed-media artist who's spent the past decade working almost exclusively with beeswax. Ava is fundamentally guided and inspired by the organic and local materials she relies on, such as Canadian beeswax, foraged wood, birch bark, foliage and horsehair. One of her current projects is an inter-species collaboration with local honey bees. This work begins in her studio with the creation of encaustic collages which are suspended in embroidery hoops. The hoops are then fixed to custom-made frames, and placed inside honeybee hives where thousands of bees embed the work in comb. This project, like all her work, explores the boundaries of where humans collide with the natural environment, and imagines a more beautiful outcome of the encounter. http://www.avaroth.ca