Lauren Bon is the queen bee of a hive that will exist long after she’s gone and her work might just have been one of the keys to saving the planet. Big? Oh, she’s all about big. I mentally call her the Empress of Big Energy and here’s why.

I don’t know Lauren, I would say, at all. Not at all. I’ve kind of met her, we’ve not had any deep conversations, but I always feel her presence strongly. I’ve volunteered at her Metabolic Studio near Chinatown a handful of times and even I’m not sure why I’m there but I heard the siren’s call to try to contribute to something unrelated to my actual work as an animal photographer and, quite honestly, to ease a troubled mind. Once the task is done, I can put it down and not have hours more work ahead of me as I do when I do rescue photography. It’s all very dreamy and I am caught up in the immensity of it. And it is like a hive in there, bordering on almost too much goodness for my brain to assimilate, but over time, my mind is expanding a little to meet the moment. I want to think on a bigger scale so I’ve been following my curiosities and I definitely fell into big energy at Metabolic.

Here’s my theory of the brilliance of her mind, which may or may not even be what she intentionally creates but definitely what she has created.

She’s an artist using the land, you can almost call her a landscape architect but the scale she works on is incomprehensibly giant. Basically, the intermountain West, but if you can’t get there as far as scale, just shave off a much smaller piece, a sliver, really, which is the 51-mile-long Los Angeles River. And even the tiny little section of the river that she works in. That's still big. And the studio itself. Very large. And all of the culture and technologies from ancient times to now and the future. Just that.

I’m not going to go deep into her background, which I’ve gleaned from a bit of research this former journalist still knows how to do, but you can start to see the patterns of her life as an artist emerge after a while.

And that pattern lands on: Lauren is turning water into honey. 

That may not be her intention. And that summary is kind of facile but it’s there, so much evidence that it’s been in her own consciousness for quite a while.

It doesn’t stop there, of course, her work does more on that theme than just making honey. The real thing is she’s simply pollinating the future. From roots of the past. In the largest to the smallest ways.

One of her most audacious ideas, “Bending the River Back into the City,” is the big ongoing project through her Metabolic studio. The river she bends is going to bisect her studio and at some point, through natural purification and transformation projects she has throughout her site, the cleaned water will be channeled into a park system to maintain its own needs using the same ancient source of water which the land has been cut off from for almost 100 years. Whew. I think I got it. 

And that of course was when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tamed that wild, reckless river into a flood control channel back in the ’30s. This grand artwork, which you probably won’t even see most of, is not completed yet, but this is big for Los Angeles. Like putting some of the storm and waste waters that just race out to the sea as fast as it can into a use that will be seen, though her hand in it may not be seen by most. I'm not sure there's another private person doing something on that scale. Some of that concrete channel has been removed to divert the water. That’s fucking audacious, I don’t care how else you see that. Giant triangular chunks removed. 

This project might just be a blueprint for showing how this kind of reintroduction of the LA River water back onto its floodplain can be done. Now affordably? Well… do we need to solve that part yet? In reality, it’s still in its proof-of-concept phase since it isn’t finished but moving a kind of crazy idea (only crazy in the sense it’s never been done) forward… that’s art, baby. That’s creativity of the highest order. When you're on the tightrope doing something big and you might just fall, that's where the best art is created, the collision of skill, courage, belief, quite a bit of crazy, naiveté, vision, and some fear and it could get ugly but it could soar. She plays big.

Whether you like it or not as art, always subjective, the set of brass ones it takes to think of that is really quite bold, I say understatedly. Her art changes things. And changes things over time. And sometimes, leaves hardly a trace of itself. Oh, you don’t like calling this art? It’s such an expression of creativity it’s hardly fathomable. What else could it be?

So now on the property, one of Metabolic’s projects is the planting of all kinds of native and cultivated species, like toyon, corn, beans, amaranth, sage, the list goes on. Very of the ancient culture of the native people but of course, very technologically and artistically oriented. 

Everything is getting cleaned up. It’s being restored and renewed and rediscovered. It’s actually quite astonishing, the lushness of the plants that grow on the site and that’s part of what the volunteers are doing, working on these plantings and techniques like watering from clay pots (guess where the clay comes from) called ollas made in-house and composting and making soil. And there are so many young people volunteering and working on this, they are learning how to be stewards of the earth and opening themselves up to the caretaking it is going to require for their own survival. #ffs That’s a lot to take in. I mean, come on.

At the same time, there is an immense amount of respect for the indigenous people who called this region home and knew how to work on and with the land and water, and interestingly, there is a spotlight put on arts and crafts that aren’t flashy, like embroidery and folklore and just nurturing creativity in general. Everyone I’ve talked to seems to have a wildly imaginative life outside of the studio and probably because of it. 

Back to the honey theory. I’ve listened to a couple of talks she’s done and she’s on a dimension I don’t understand — a lot of people do understand it, just not me, not my language and possibly I'm not evolved enough as a human being yet — so I need to use my simple brain to take it in. And my simple brain connects the dots and the dots are:

She often talks about proto-pollinators, people who drop off some thoughts in your brain and you make what you will of the seeds they've planted, the ones that sprout, the flowers that bloom for your life. She doesn't say it quite so flowery but she was pollinated. I mean, we all are products of other people’s influences, but she knows her pollinators and she was pollinated well. And believe me, she is pollinating. And that, if you don’t read any more, is what she is doing on a very grand scale. Everything she is doing is going back into the community, the collective. Just like symbolically spreading some Metabolic compost that I sifted on my lemon tree because my lemon tree brings all the bees to my yard. It's back in the system.

I’m not wrong to take this view, it’s clear to me, but you can go right to the source and poke around on your own. Interpreting this work is like a tarot card reading, I’m just reading the energy from the cards I see. Your cards might tell you something entirely different about this place, there are so many paths of entry. Different cards, different decks, different readers. Take what works for you.

But even if the artist hadn’t intended a reading from their creation and had not created it for that reason, it’s no longer up to them to control what is interpreted. It was their vision, but not solely their narrative once it’s released. The ideas have been sent off. Will they hold in 30 years? Or 300?

At Metabolic’s Moon site, a former lot for towed cars with heavily polluted soil, my first volunteer experience was weeding, and the area we worked in was like honeycomb pavers, and I really enjoyed weeding on that embedded surface because you could see you were actually accomplishing something. We were weeding out grasses so that the more native plants could thrive and those plants cleanse the soil. Yeah, you’re gonna see the bees out there. This site is a whole other story onto itself. A dot.

Inside one of the buildings, it’s like you would expect it to be the lair of some contemporary super hero or villain, there is her 2007 work Honey Chandelier. And it’s cool. A sculpture, I guess, of jars of honey she’s collected from beekeepers throughout the world. A dot.

So reading the transcript of her The Brooklyn Rail interview with Phong Bui, the bees are in there. She’s talking about the bees in 2020. So there is the leitmotif that is appearing from early on, her influences to start, but it continues.

“… I would like to draw the study that I've done through the years that almost every religion has the stories about the disappearance and emergence of bees and connects it to our human consciousness so that it's been said that often famine, which is caused by the disappearance of bees, is the only thing that's capable of stopping war,” she said in the 2020 interview with Bui. “So, the disappearance of bees might also be the bee's higher intelligence helping us save ourselves from conflict that we're incapable of solving without famine.”

Okay, that’s big! The bees are definitely in the thought process. That’s evidence, right? You can watch the interview, fascinating, or read it. 

And another project was 2007’s The Bee Box, an art project with two hives like giant lungs and two queens. Do I need to say? Dot?

I can't quite see a true bee connection from her 2005's Not a Cornfield because corn is pollinated by wind, but there either is one or isn't one. I don't know. The framework for 2023’s The Smallest Sea with the Largest Heart looks suspiciously like a honeycomb. Not quite, but I can reach. And that project cleans water at the Salton Sea, which may be the smallest sea but truly the grossest water, I don’t know how to make that sound pretty. That's a different stream in her pick-your-own-adventure.

But bees are not just about honey, right? My father had a beekeeping hobby and his interest was the local, mesquite honey his hive produced. But, and this is a fact, there are 1600+ bee species native to California, and not one of them makes honey. Or lives in a hive. But they pollinate. 

These bees are essential to a healthy ecosystem, and they may be here now, but I think we all know the reality is the planet is on fire and the decimation of the bee population should be a warning of the highest magnitude. I cry a little inside every time I see a dead bee in my yard. Bees are life. Plants are life. Soil is life. Water is life.

There are so many plant projects going on at Metabolic, it’s an aspect of the volunteering part I go to. And if you see the soil and water purification experiments going on and you’re talking to people you don’t know but who are interesting and vital and you witness the thriving plant life and a riot of color of the spring bloom and the buzzing of the bees sipping some nectar cocktails while collecting pollen and everyone is being seduced by the sun even though they never really allow the sun to touch you when you're working, you really start to feel some hope. A connection to all around you.

You see the strange mystery that is Los Angeles, that violent tangle of beauty and the beast in this crackling creativity and heavy energy and grit and wealth and have-nots and a city trying to define itself, all of which feels very alive at the river. The duality. Good/Bad Positive/Negative Yin/Yang Light/Dark Rich/Poor Kind/Cruel Divinity/Humanity Creator/Destroyer Life/Death

Is that just what I see? The eternal dance of two sides of the same thing but honestly you have to veer a little more toward the light side of things.

Her studio’s philosophy embraces equalizing duality with its “Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy” ethos first coined by Sherrie Rabinowitz of the Electronic Café International and you will eventually get that message at Metabolic. Especially because that phrase has been rendered into a large red neon sign at the studio and I, sometimes simple as I am, finally felt those words come alive for me after a few volunteer shifts.

Lauren is not just the artist, but she is the art, make no mistake. And she may not be collecting the honey for herself, she may never even see it, but she’s making it possible for others in the future to still have the bees. And life itself.

And that’s how she’s turning water into honey, sending a gift to the future and a hope for humanity. Suddenly you realize, saving the planet doesn’t seem like such a flex for her. Her ability to create is beyond this space and time, really. Even if you can't see it.

PS Oh shit, someone is going to say, it's not the honey at all! It's the mycelium! We can read that one, too, but that’s a different card shuffle. It's really the bees.