Luke Bowles
Thousands of bodies swirl across the canvas, their legs tracing intricate lines and weaving a frenzy of emergent patterns and networks. What might sound like a feat of social organizing didn’t occur in a museum, park, or artist’s studio.
It was done in a lab—with ants.
During the COVID pandemic, Horace Zeng, a fire ant researcher at the University of Georgia, was running routine experiments. While marking fire ants with little dabs of paint to identify them, a new idea struck: instead of marking ants for identification, what if he let the ants leave their own marks on the canvas?
One of Zeng’s early paintings. While he could set the initial paint block, the ants took the lead from there.
At first, this was a simple exploration of insect behavior and art. Zeng would carefully drip non-toxic paint into the center of a blank canvas, then release thousands of fire ants on top. As the ants scattered, their minuscule bodies picked up pigments, streaking and swirling colors across the surface in mesmerizing, unpredictable patterns.
By this stage, the ants’ natural instincts dictated every brushstroke, making each piece a record of their collective journey.
Then, in late 2021, Zeng met Jiayi Guo, a PhD student in art history at the same university. Realizing their shared passion for combining science and art, the pair joined forces and began collaborating immediately, starting with the paintings.
Guo brought a fresh perspective, injecting deliberate aesthetic structure by carefully planning spatial composition, selecting materials, and timing the ant releases to influence the final effect.
Yet, somewhere along this process, the relationship between the collaborators and their tiny subjects began to shift. The ants were no longer just research specimens. They were collaborators.
“The laboratory transformed into a co-creative space where those sterile boundaries between observation and participation blurred. The study subjects became akin to co-participants in the generation of the works,” Guo said.
Guo and Zeng could prepare the materials, set the stage, and step back, but every mark, every pattern, every composition was theirs.
“We came to see the scientific process not solely as a process of control and measurement, but also as an opportunity to witness and respond to nonhuman agency,” Zeng said.
He is also quick to point out that this wasn’t a matter of training or coaxing.
“These are vicious, aggressive animals, and they don’t listen to you,” Zeng said. “You can’t really control them in whatever way you want. So, we have to work with them. They truly have agency in that sense.”
Later on in 2022, the pair were still making fire ant paintings when Zeng heard about a striking behavior from a colleague: these fire ants, when encountering a sticky surface, will methodically cover it with debris. He read the paper, made a video to showcase the behavior, and posted it to Twitter on a whim. It went viral.
The video’s popularity pushed Zeng and Guo to expand this side project into something much larger. They began exploring how ants could be guided to create art with more than just paint, and formalized the collaboration by creating H&J studio.
Next, the duo selected objects to be transformed, coating them in sticky vaseline. Nearby, they provided vibrant materials like colored pebbles or glitter, inviting the insects’ problem-solving and nest-building instincts. As the ants encountered the sticky surface and began to groom themselves, they instinctively carried and arranged the materials piece by piece, gradually transforming the objects into dazzling mosaics.
A sticky trap that the ants covered in glitter.
During this phase, Guo came to see their project as an opportunity to reach people and educate them about a well-known, yet widely-hated insect species.
“I just kept asking how my artwork could evoke the public, evoke the people. How can I make this project teachable?” Guo said.
That impulse to connect with the public grew from something persistent about these ants. The red imported fire ant causes up to $8 billion in damage annually in the US, so the species is often defined almost entirely by its destruction.
Against this backdrop, Guo and Zeng asked: Is it fair to reduce an entire species to its worst quality?
The red imported fire ant is a notorious invasive pest in the Southeastern US, with its range expanding rapidly worldwide. Here, a queen is pictured. (I left the copyright there so we can credit them properly).
“Why we have funding to study them in most cases is to kill them, but of course, when we are evolutionary biologists, we know how amazing they are,” Zeng said.
For Zeng, that tension between pest and collaborator creature became increasingly difficult to ignore the more time he spent in the lab watching the ants make their artworks.
“It did change the way I saw them. I had to try to feel what the ants are feeling more carefully and to observe them more closely,” Zeng said. “This is not gonna sound very scientific, but I had to try to feel what they’re feeling.”
But perhaps the project’s most unexpected turn had nothing to do with the ants. In trying to understand a species neither of them fully controlled, Guo and Zeng found they first had to understand each other.
“At the beginning, we just combined his science knowledge and my artistic skills,” Guo said. “We thought that we could just merge the ideas together. But it’s not that easy. We found it’s much more dynamic than just merging two ideas together. We had to change our perspectives and learn from each other in order to learn from the ants.”
What began as a study of an invasive pest gradually became something far harder to categorize: an evolving collaboration that was equal parts science, art, and mutual discovery. The ants remained the same, but the people observing them had changed.
Now, the pair is expanding beyond just ants. Currently, the duo is experimenting with using mole crickets, a type of subterranean cricket, to create intricate ceramic pieces.
A ceramic piece created by mole crickets. After receiving a grant from the Lamar Dodd School of Art, the duo is actively experimenting with other insects and media.
Zeng ultimately ends with a challenge, not just for scientists or artists, but for anyone who has ever looked at something and thought they already knew what it was.
“A good scientist should have some artistic background, and a good artist should know experimentation and the scientific method,” Zeng said. “In that sense, ultimately, we want to promote the idea that science and arts really are just two sides of the same coin.”
Author
Luke Bowles is a graduate student at the University of Missouri, where he is working toward a Ph.D. in entomology. He earned his undergraduate degree in cognitive science and philosophy from the University of Georgia. At the University of Missouri, he is researching how private pollinator gardens support native bee diversity and the social factors underlying participation in these initiatives to support pollinator conservation. His communication background includes working as an editor of his high school paper, the University of Georgia’s Political Review, and running his science communication Instagram account, Bowles Bugs. He is currently working at the News and Observer as anAAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellow. You can see his personal website here.
Editors-
Rohini Subrahmanyam and Ananya Sen
