Bees Eye View

Artstation is working with the Bumblebee Conservation Trust on a Shrill Carder Bee project. This is one of ten artist commissions accross Wales in the Natural Resources Wales - Natur am Bydd programme. ( link below ).

We based our project in the Newport Wetlands, one of only five sites across Britain where this rare bee thrives. We are working with Tom Bucher Flynn from the Bumblebee Conservation Trust who shares his research and information to answer bumblebee questions. The project happens while the bees hibernate over winter and the colony regenerates. How to bring a species which can’t be physically witnessed, into focus?

At the wetland’s education room, a short presentation introduces the Carder Bee and its foraging habitat. We then head out into the dormant winter wetland. Those gathered have been given wireless headphones. As we walk noting the muted landscape around us, a soundscape from the previous summer, the hush of the rushes and the F# buzz of the shrill carder bee and the birds - we relax into a summer feeling we carry in our memory prompted by the sounds of summer. Listeners are invited to select and distribute standing totems, an installation colour field that recreates the aesthetics of wildflowers in the landscape that are foraged by absent bees. A bell sound introduces the tone of a shruti box, a classical Indian instrument, bellows and reed-based drone sounds are tuned to resonate around the bee’s buzz. Philip Gross reads from his specially commissioned poem, Fugue in the Key of Bee. A bell sounds an end to the ceremony.

In essence, we revisit the sensations of the past summer to celebrate this amazing creature asleep somewhere in the depths of winter. It is both a call for the bee’s return in the summer and a longing for the world of colour that sustains it, a peaen to a species under serious threat.

The activity finishes returning to the visitor centre with the question, has this meditation on the dormant bee’s life brought us closer to nature?

https://naturalresources.wales/about-us/news-a nd-blogs/news/saving-nature-through-arts-engagement/?

The project is under development. Aspects of documentation will be housed in the Peoples Collection and Natural Resources Wales will host two poetry films we are making.