WINGED MIGRATIONS

                                                  An interactive project with honey bees.
I have always been fascinated by pollinators and in particular honey bees which lead me to become involved in a number of art projects that allow nature to interact with my work directly altering it.
In this project I created seven small art works that were inserted into bees hives allowing 50,000 bees to interact with them over several weeks. The honey bees built comb over parts of the art or removed parts of the paper collage surfaces to create intriguing shapes.

The project was magically informative and I learned a lot about the life of bees and how they
live in harmonious communities where the individual supports the whole hive. We can learn much from them about how to live in more balanced and sustainable ways on this earth.

I love this quote:
“The bee's life is like a magic well: the more you draw from it, the more it fills with water,” said Karl Von Frisch, a Nobel-prize winning scientist, credited for discovering the waggle dance, a choreographed language bees use to "point" to the location of pollen and nectar. The life of the honeybee has captivated people across the centuries, and in recent years it’s been hard to ignore their plight, dying in their unexplained millions across the world. It’s a well know fact that, without bees, the natural cycle of life might well fall apart, and indeed Albert Einstein once reportedly said, “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left”. 

This project was funded in thanks to an Artist Trust GAP grant this year.