Residing in the Pacific Northwest, Shannon Amidon is an artist, beekeeper, environmental steward, wonder seeker, lover of insects, books, and plants. As an encaustic artist, she is keenly attuned to the bond between art and nature; honeybees produce the wax she uses for her encaustic paint. But there are other reasons that she explores natural history and environmental issues through her artwork: her formative years involved a substantial amount of time surrounded by and exploring nature. Those childhood roots in the natural world stimulated her personal, political, and aesthetic concerns with our current ecological challenges. Concerned about all aspects of the environment, she finds herself responding with increasing alarm to intensive farming and urbanization, pesticide use, introduced species, and other triggers of climate change. Consequently, her artwork places a particular focus on the decline of pollinators and other insects due to the loss and destruction of their habitats.

Using her curiosity about these ecological interconnections to create paintings and installations that draw attention to our environmental crises, through images of bees, honeycombs, dragonflies, moths, and other flora and fauna, Shannon puts her encaustic materials to emphatic use—these pieces not only portray a threatened world, but they also call attention to the fact that the very medium of encaustic cannot exist without the survival of bees. By portraying the cycles of life, death, and impermanence in her work, she hopes to raise awareness about environmental issues, inviting her audience to see nature not as a backdrop but as a vital element of our existence.