>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. >> Next up is Canadian Visual Artist Sarah Hatton. Sarah's deep interest in human nature and insatiable curiosity about the natural works are found throughout her paintings and mixed media work. Through her paintings and projects, she observes and explores notions of longing, transition, morality, and human connections with nature. She's here today to share about her process of creating. Please welcome Sarah Hatton. ^M00:00:36 [ Applause ] ^M00:00:40 >> Sarah Hatton: Thank you. I'm Sarah. I'm a visual artist from Ottawa, Canada. I'm a lifelong naturalist. I like challenging myself in horticultural ways. I grew the only giant sequoia from seed but it survived the Canadian winter six times in a row. Of course, like any millennial, the little tree has its own Twitter account. I'm also a beekeeper. Now if there's one thing I can say about my artwork, in general, it's that science and nature always seem to make an experience in it. It's something I just can't switch off. I was invited here today to talk about my latest series of work, which is called Attachment. But I thought I would give you a bit of background into a previous series of work that I did just so that you can start to see the connections that I'm talking about. ^M00:01:38 ^M00:01:42 So, 2013 was not a good year for bees -- not a good year for my bees, as well as some of the other beekeepers' colonies in the region that I live in. I lost all of my colonies and because we're a tight network, beekeepers, I was learning more and more about colony [inaudible] disorder, the global bee crisis and systemic pesticides that have been thought to be causing a lot of the problems with the bees. So, when I lost my hives, I wanted to do something meaningful with them so that I could start some activism and start to talk about was happening to them. But I didn't know what to do. I had all of these -- thousands of dead bodies and I didn't have the idea yet, so what does one do in that case? I bagged them up in Zip-locks and I put them in my freezer until I had my eureka moment. My family is either really understanding about this or they're just resigned to the stuff that I do now. And the eureka moment came when I thought about the mathematical patterns that are inherent in nature, particularly the Fibonacci sequence of math that is found in seed producing plants, like the sunflower. And it was these patterns that gave me my inspiration for what to finally do. These are the sorts of crops that are treated with the same pesticides that are thought to be destroying the bees. So, I glued -- one by one -- all of the honeybees into these patterns and then I coated them with resin. And the resulting work -- this is the prototype and I get to do a cool, badass art disclaimer here that some of these patterns tend to use the sense of vertigo in some viewers so if you start to feel uncomfortable, just close your eyes. ^M00:03:42 ^M00:03:56 These are 4 feet across. ^M00:03:58 ^M00:04:07 So, these are -- because systemic pesticides affect the bee's central nervous system and they wipe out the ability to navigate and get back to their hives, I chose patterns from crop circles as well that gave a similar affect -- an optical illusion effect to the viewer and gave that same sense of disorientation. That's another piece that's 4 feet by 4 feet circle. It's about 10,000 bees in that piece. So, you can read study after study of the data behind the bee decline but when you look at art, art gives you that visceral gut-punch of emotion that tells you what the story is behind what you're seeing. This series got quite a bit of international press, partly because I think of the timing of it, the bee decline was just starting to be recognized but also, not a lot of artists out these using thousands of dead bees as their medium, I don't -- I hope that's still the case. ^M00:05:12 ^M00:05:24 So, what I want you to think about here is that I've used a single item repeated on math to send a specific message through a symbolic pattern, which brings me to my next series of work. So, meanwhile in Canada, Library in Archives Canada, our colleagues to the north, have started their mass digitization project. It's a multiyear, enormous project with many, many resources devoted to it. and that's the digitization of the complete collection of the CEF, Canadian Expeditionary Force World War I files. And this is an enormous undertaking and the data that will be produced by the digitization project, a treasure in itself, but there -- as anyone who has done a mass digitization project knows, there's byproducts that come from it, you have to hire additional staff to process the files. These are paper records that have been held together for a hundred years by pins, stapes, and paperclips. And when I turned the preservation center, the thing that struck me, as an aside from the immensity of the project, was that they had bin, after bin, after bin of these brass pins that held the records together that had been taken apart and it struck me as so moving to see -- physically represented in front of me -- the number of people that this was. And I asked them, what are you going to do with all of these pins? And they said, well, we want to do something to commemorate the project but we're not quite sure what. We're thinking of maybe melting them all down and making metals or coins. And I thought -- that didn't sit well with me because I had that reaction to seeing the number of them and these were items that held together Canada's military memory for a hundred years, you can't just take that kind of destroy it by melting it all together, there's something there. Again, waiting for my eureka moment, I said, give me one of them to take home and I'll think about this and see what I come up with. So, I took one of them back and I was just sitting there looking at it and I thought each one of these fasteners has been embossed, it was the style of the time, with a star, eureka. So, this is what I did. >> This is a single brass fastener pin. It's 100-years-old. These are the pins that held together the military service records of each Canadian soldier who served in the First World War. When Library and Archives Canada began their mass digitization of soldier's files, each of these pins had to be detached by hand. In total, there were 640,000 of them. ^M00:08:19 ^M00:08:26 Nobody knew what to do with all of this brass and so they asked an artist. >> Sarah Hatton: I wanted to do something with these fasteners that would preserve their meaning as historical artifacts but it would also find a respectful way to convey the magnitude of human loss during [inaudible]. ^M00:08:50 ^M00:08:55 Each fastener is stamped with a star and there's unmistakable military symbolism attached to the gold star when you think about the sacrifice that these families have made and it was that that gave me my inspiration for this. I started by focusing on the five major battles of the First World War that involved the Canadian's Expeditionary Force. >> After determining the geographical coordinates of each of these battles, Hatton generated star maps of what the skies would have looked like on the nights following each of these major conflicts. Then she got to work. ^M00:09:42 [ Music ] ^M00:10:27 The result is a series of star charts titled, Detachment. These pieces show us exactly how the stars appeared 100 years ago, the first night after the fighting was over, the skies that, no doubt, the surviving soldiers would have been looking up at. >> Sarah Hatton: This series is a tribute piece, sacrifice, timelessness, and remembrance. Regardless of your political view, stars are a cross cultural constant that we look to for direction, whether that's spiritual or navigational. They're a universal way that we recognize and memorialize the fallen. ^M00:11:24 [ Music ] ^M00:11:42 I want to express my sincere gratitude to Library and Archives Canada for pointing me in this direction and to -- in particular -- Library and Archivist [Foreign name] for his support in this project. And I also want to thank the Library of Congress for inviting me here today to share this with you, it's been an honor. Thank you. ^M00:12:00 [ Applause ] ^M00:12:05 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^M00:12:13