Fifty years ago, Mark Thompson had an idea. He’d go out into the woods, take off his clothing, pour a bucket of honey over himself, and provide a banquet for any honeybees and butterflies nearby.

Granted, it was an unusual idea. And an utter failure, he admits.

“I stood there for two hours, covered in honey, and no one came,” he told Los Angeles-based art critic David Pagel years later.

After that, Thompson immersed himself in learning all he could about honeybees and began keeping bees, and soon was ready to try again — this time attaching a queen bee trapped in a small cage clipped to his hair, resulting in “Immersion,” a 30-minute video installation made from 1974 to 1976.

“Within a matter of months I had such deep affection and a feeling of closeness to the hive and the bees, that I knew this would be a life’s work,” says Thompson, who often uses his body and honeybees in his works to explore relationships between cultural and natural communication systems.

Thompson revisits that film and his decades-long relationship with honeybees in “Semaphore,” an installation at the Headlands Center of the Arts in the Marin Headlands, which is marking its 40th anniversary. His work appears along with Ann Hamilton’s “here • there • then • now.”

Thompson, who lives in Orinda in his grandmother’s house with a handful of beehives in his yard, was one of the artists who helped shape the arts center after the former military property was transferred to the National Park Service in the 1970s. The first building rehabilitation was in 1987, driven by famed artist David Ireland in collaboration with Thompson and 24 student interns from San Francisco State, California College of the Arts and other area universities.

When Thompson arrived at the Headlands, he was delighted to discover that there were wild beehives in the attics of all of the buildings, including the gymnasium, where “Semaphore” takes place. “That was a tremendous fascination for me, to use as a beginning of some of my artwork here,” he says. “The smell of the wax and the honey created this wonderful aroma. Everything else in the building was dead and in some ways a tomb, but when we got to the attic, it was like an inverted ship. It was visually very stunning. That kind of sealed my commitment to start.”

Focused on eyes

In “Immersion,” Thompson’s head, neck and bare chest become completely covered in thousands of bees as he stands perfectly still for nearly an hour against a vivid blue sky, hoping to disappear and let the natural elements take over. It ends in a sort of still life, he says. But looking at his film, Thompson became curious about what was happening to his eyes.

“The part that most interested me before the bees formed the cloak, I was trying to keep my eyes open to experience the bees as fully as I could. My eyes were trying to protect me by reflexively closing their lids,” says Thompson.

“Semaphore” is a highly enlarged close up of what was going on with his eyes.

“What you see is the lids and eyes flickering and closing and I’m always trying to keep my eyes open and have an awareness of what’s going, the eyes want to protect themselves so they’re closing,” he says. “So when I saw that in 1976, I was so taken by the eyes. Most people were looking at the larger drama of the covering, but what fascinated me was the eyes.”

Thompson had hoped to work with live bees when he was invited to create a project celebrating the Headlands’ 40th anniversary, but the Golden Gate National Recreation Area nixed the idea as the bees are seen as an invasive species. So Thompson shifted to editing the video.

One of Thompson’s first projects in the newly restored gym in the 1980s was a collaboration with choreographer Joanna Haigood, an artist-in-residence at the time, called “The Keeping of Bees is Like the Directing of Sunshine,” a performance integrating architecture, dance, light, scent and the bees’ flight inspired by the hives they found there. “It was very, very dramatic, sort of a vignette of beekeeping,” he says

As he did for that collaboration, Thompson made beeswax inserts for the windows for “Semaphore,” the first art project he’s done at the Headlands since the 1980s.

“The whole gym is illuminated by a kind of orange-amber light,” he says, as are the windows on the stairs leading up to the space. “When you step in, the whole building is humming, filled with the sound of bees. It’s visually intense, the sound is intense and that’s where the semaphore comes in — my eyes are blinking, creating some sort of poetic code. … People will feel like they’ve stepped into a hive.

“I waited 50 years to be able to do this,” he says.

“Mark has transformed our gymnasium into an immersive installation that encompasses sound, video and sculpture, and bridges artistic disciplines. His approach epitomizes the imaginative experimentation that takes place in our artist studios each day, and we’re thrilled to share it with the public,” says Mari Robles, the center’s executive director.

“Mark’s works, by definition, are alive; not

‘about’ life; but are life performances. Thus they are without limit, without fixed form,” writes Mark Bartlett, a cultural historian who studies and writes about the intersection of art, science and technology. “They are performances, but ones that do not conform to traditional narrative structures or forms; they do not have beginnings, middles and ends. No more than a hive does.”

Science to art

The one-time wanna-be electrical engineer and self-described tinkerer let go of his logical thinking to welcome a more poetic way of experiencing the world, inspired by Charles C. Miller, a doctor who abandoned his profession for beekeeping and wrote several books, including “A Year Among the Bees” in 1886, “Forty Years Among the Bees” in 1903, followed by “Fifty Years Among the Bees” in 1911, considered a classic for beekeepers. “I have dreamed of making it 50 years, so I’m there,” Thompson says.

Along the way, he’s developed what he calls a sixth sense about honeybees, which are getting harder to care for because of our changing environment. “I’m more determined than ever to keep them alive and I’ll keep them as long as I’m living. I’m worried about the environment no longer being as supportive of the honeybees as it was.”

Thompson doesn’t have a particular agenda with “Semaphore.”

“There’s no specific message. It’s more about one animal and species being close to another,” he says.

Still, he is hopeful all his projects present the possibility of a relationship with another species.

“I think the human species has been so dominant and getting more dominant, and we’re seeing the realities of our dominance. I think things have been profoundly out of balance and getting more out of balance with more time,” he says. “What I’m hoping to suggest is, if there’s a sympathetic relationship between ourselves and another animal, another life, and we become more conscious of that, we in turn make different decisions about how to behave or how to respect or care for the environment. The environment is us. I think you can get balance when listening and being available to another life.”