What’s all the buzz about?

Sculptor Britt Ransom loves a good prank — and insects. So when she heard about the time Andover students released hundreds of brown crickets in the Class of 1945 Library on the Thursday before Exeter/Andover weekend, she knew she had found the inspiration for her installation Scoreless Match.

Ransom spent weeks crafting a legion of laser-cut crickets of various sizes and “released” them in the Lamont Gallery, where some climbed walls and others sat among model shapes based on the library’s architecture. The work extended to the library, where Ransom placed fabricated insects in the stacks as a nod to the original prank and had insect sounds played over the library speakers at 3:50 p.m. each day of the show. She also built a clear acrylic enclosure for live crickets.

“Through sound, movement and quiet spatial disruptions,” Lamont Gallery Director and Curator Pam Meadows says, “this work invites us to think of memory not as something fixed in record, but as something that clings to thresh-olds, lingers in atmospheres and settles into the unnoticed seams of the built environment as a gesture of humor and reminder of the world outside of what we build.”

Ransom was one of five artists featured in the Lamont Gallery’s “Strange Kin” exhibition this fall. These artists “embrace their affection and comfort in entomology, using arthropods as their muses and collaborators,” Meadows says. “Collectively, the works on view braid pure aesthetic joy with stinging commentary on environmental issues, species decline and conservation.”

This story was originally published in the fall 2025 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.