The common housefly has a particular presence in the Northwest Arkansas summertime narrative. As nostalgic as the season can be here in the Ozarks, you can’t really have it without battling the flies. Often viewed as nothing but a pest, a large number of these little guys can also signify that three things have been present in the ecosystem: Trash, Warmer Winters, and Heavy Rain. Looking at this multimedia portrait of the common housefly and its fallen miniatures in clay, consider these questions: as our population increases so rapidly, how much trash are we producing, and where is it going? How will human and insect interactions change as our warm weather grows meaner and longer? What does the yearly swarm of flies communicate to us about our home and our ecosystem, if anything?

This work is a collaboration between Rainy Bray and Haven Brown. Both Northwest Arkansas natives, Rainy is a potter by trade and Haven is a local creative who graduated with a BS in Art and Culture from John Brown University. When setting out to create this work, we knew we would be combining different mediums and strengths from both of our art practices. We wanted to capture the feelings of summer in the Ozarks and ended up in an exploration and deep dive of research into the common house fly. Both of us enjoy very tactile experiences and anything that can catch us off guard or steal our attention… sometimes all it takes is a dead house fly on the back of the sink to start the snowball, mind racing from disgust, then turning to intrigue at all the small parts, leading to a quick google, then a YouTube video, and a few hours later we’ve sculpted some flies and painted a portrait.