Kate Ogley and Catarina Fontoura
“Call To Wonder”
St Euny Churchyard, on the edge of Redruth, has been in continuous use for over 1,400 years, its gravestones reflecting both ancient histories and the town’s mining past. Our project explores the site as a more-than-human ecosystem, focusing on bees from both wild and domestic colonies.
Through radical noticing, monitoring, and collaborative exchange, we will trace their hidden journeys with support from beekeepers and social insect scientists. In the studio, bees become guides to creativity, collective intelligence, transformation, and death. Using gauze, plaster, wax, honey, and smoke, we will create works rooted in healing, memory, and connection, while engaging local community and wellbeing groups.
The project is led by artists Kate Ogley and Catarina Fontoura.
Kate Ogley is based in Cornwall and works with digital film, sound, and installation. Her practice includes artist-led initiatives, commissions, residencies, and innovative workshops. Ogley’s work explores ideas of belonging and the processes through which we make somewhere our home — how memory becomes embedded within new places and landscapes. Her practice considers the passage of people, time, and imagination, and the experience of crossing from one world into another. She is particularly interested in the role of imagination in reconstructing and enchanting the world.
Catarina Fontoura is an artist, educator, and writer. She recently submitted her PhD thesis in History of Photography at Birkbeck, University of London, specialising in visual histories of science. She was the recipient of a Collaborative Doctoral Award between Birkbeck and the Royal Society, where she researched expeditionary photographic archives. The outcomes of her doctoral research were presented at the third Photographies Journal International Conference in 2022.
Fontoura’s artistic practice explores the relationships between art, science, spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. She is particularly interested in reconfiguring land into entangled systems and narratives that embed human beings within more-than-human worlds. Her work has been exhibited in Germany, the USA, Mexico, the UK, and Portugal.
As part of the project, the workshop Mapping Emergence develops an art–science collaboration that seeks social and ecological wisdom within insect colonies. Drawing on the logics of complex systems — adaptation, decentralisation, and interconnectedness — the workshop reveals hidden narratives within ant, bee, and wasp societies, translating them into multi-authorial works shaped through collective and meditative practices.
Through participatory and collectivising methods, the workshop engages with biodiversity loss, invasive species, and pollination collapse — not as distant crises, but as entangled and shared realities.
The work challenges boundaries between human and more-than-human, and between art and science. The “third space” that emerges through genuine collaboration across species and disciplines offers new methodologies for creative exchange and for responding collectively to ecological crisis.
