Bound Words-Stolen Honey was first produced for Tallentire’s Slade Postgraduate Fine Art Media final show in 1988. The material elements of the work consist of: hand-made wallpaper depicting a pattern based on an image of the spines of books in Senate House Library; a hand-bound book containing photocopied transcripts of sections of the Brehon Laws’ Bee Judgements in Ancient Irish, Modern Irish and English; a video depicting a fragment of text from The Life of Bees by the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck; a wooden box and a sheet of glass placed over a sanded and scrubbed floor. This early work draws the viewer in, across and through the work to engage with various elements that signify an interest in chance, place, history, language, labour, apparatus and object.
