Giving her self-described “kitschy” art an upcycling spin, Mae Honeysuckle, aka Love Bugs, has found a valuable art form in finding beauty in the oddest of places.
“I do a lot of second hand upcycling stuff, thrifted or second hand goods,” Honeysuckle said.
“I’ll take them and reuse them in different ways. For example, I get necklaces and cut them up and use all of the beads to make something new. For clothing, I get lots of blanks and then I can put bleach work on them, or do printmaking with inks and stamps. And find cool and nifty things and then I turn them into hair clips and accessories.
“So a lot of the stuff that I at least make to sell is like second hand, upcycled, because I think sustainability is really important to me, and things not ending up in landfills,” they said.
One of Honeysuckle’s favorite items that they sell often are their fishing lure jewelry.
“They’re old fishing lures that I can cut all of the hooks off of and then make them into necklaces or key chains,” Honeysuckle said. “I think it’s really interesting because it’s this kind of manly fishing hook that I take and turn into cute little jewelry pieces.”
Like their fishing hook jewelry, many of Honeysuckle’s other pieces challenge gender norms.
“I feel like a lot of my art isn’t specifically for one gender or the other. I try to make a lot of androgynous stuff to help out,” they said. “Because a lot of my friends, and I assume customers, are queer in some way. And so making gender affirming stuff is really fun and interesting to me in the things I like to do … like fish hooks and things that you would traditionally see as like masculine and then making them dainty by adding pearls and glass beads to it to make it a little more feminine … none of my clothing is specifically masculine or feminine, it’s mostly just whatever you want to wear.”
While a majority of Honeysuckle’s Love Bugs art is more niche, or as they say, “very whimsical,” their fine arts pieces lean into their other talents.
Now in their second year at UCA, Honeysuckle focuses primarily on sculpture and printmaking. They have worked on a variety of different sculpture mediums from stone carving, moldmaking and primarily claywork. They are now beginning to put work into metal casting as well.
Some of Honeysuckle’s favorite pieces they have worked on include her stone carving piece, “Fiona Apple” as well as “Consumption.”
“My stone carving I did. It’s my most recent work and is my favorite piece I’ve done. It’s limestone that I carved into a mostly eaten apple,” Honeysuckle said. “I called it ‘Fiona Apple’ because of the artists … and [it’s] kind of talking about eating disorders in a way, because it’s very hard to eat. Obviously, you’re not gonna eat a rock, [an] inanimate object that I turned into this fruit … ‘Fiona Apple’ herself makes a lot of music, at least talking about eating disorders and body image … a lot of my professors really appreciated that and liked it.”
“‘Consumption’ is a collage work piece that I did,” they said. “It’s a bunch of carnivorous things in nature … the collage I made digitally, and then I transferred it, painting it on with oil paintings onto a proper canvas, and it was just a bunch of different things that were carnivorous, like there was maggots and fly traps, like venus flytraps … there’s mold that also consumes everything in there.”
When Honeysuckle isn’t creating art, they’re working as the market vendor manager for Dead Party Media, a local Conway music media outlet.
“We’re working right now on doing a market, a spring break market.” Being held on March 28 at the main street pop up park.
“We did one last year around this time, and it was really fun. And just a bunch of vendors, artists, mostly artist vendors, not really resellers, but a lot of this will be like makers,” they said.
Honeysuckle will also be selling work at the market, such as jewelry, hair clips, pants and shirts as well as some prints of personal pieces.
Honeysuckle’s Love Bugs art can be found on instagram @love.bugs501.
