My 8.5 Meter Bee Prototype Goes Up in Katherine at the Godinymayin Yijard River Arts & Culture Centre GYRACC

In Katherine in the Northern Territory….

my big 8.5 Meter Bee Friendly prototype goes up at GTRACC.  For many years I have been exploring different types of installations that could be made out of paper for 30 Bee Friendly installations. These installations will launch three months of Bee centric activities as a part of my new show called, It’s All a Beautiful Noise (IAABN).

The three months of activities are inspired by visiting the Bees BIG IDEA project and visual arts exhibition in Sun Valley, Idaho. Click the link to view the type of community activities we will be curating. https://issuu.com/sunvalleycenterforthearts/docs/bees.final_web

Watching how bee populations around the world have been disappearing, and learning that their immune systems are compromised by chemicals and lack of foraging, I was inspired to create a groundswell of support for our pollinators, and the local beekeepers – who are the real Rock Stars on the planet by creating ‘spectacle community experiences’ to start a conversation:

What does a bee friendly community look like?

What does a bee friendly household look like?

What does a bee friendly farm look like?

What are the things our town can do to make it Bee Friendly?

I am so grateful to my good friend Jo Gillies at Archisoul Architects for supporting my vision to build a Bee. Jo enlisted her student Harrrison Dumesich to work with me on my design! Thank you, Jo and Harrison, I could not have done it without you both. It means so much that you were both able to travel to Katherine and build the bee with me. I also need to say, a very special thank you to Rhan Cain. Thank you beautiful man for your super hero support. And a very special thank you to Rob Stoneham for your continued support!

One never knows when creating something physical for the first time if it’s going to work, particularly out of materials you’ve never worked with before. A lot can go wrong, but in our case it all went right. Harrison designed our bee using a CAD program. Our bee is made from recycled card;  2 – 16mm thick white card glued to the outside of a 30mm card to meet our specifications. The 27 glued sheets were then shipped to Darwin where the various sections and pieces that make up the bee were then cut out on a CNC Router. A special thank you to Brad Sisson SignCityNT in Darwin who cut our bee, and Brad Hugget at Rebul in Melbourne who supplied the card!

A thousand kisses to everyone who made it possible!

What an amazing feeling it is to see people engage with our bee. I love touching it and walking inside it. It was absolutely delightful watching little kids jump in and out of the butt of the bee! Fun! Of course there are tweaks that need to be made to design, like the wings and the bolts. The wings are too small and the bolts too big and bulky. Both Harrison and myself were a little too conservative with the wings. But no matter, we now know what needs to be done to make it perfect.

Assembling it with Harrison and Jo after putting after months of work into the design was pure gold… needless to say we celebrated with a nice bottle of Prosecco!!

We designed the bee so it could easily be put together like IKEA flat packed furniture. My brief: I want Bee Friendly to be something local galleries and their communities can build together effortlessly. It must be constructed out of lightweight materials, easy to handle, simple to put together, and include easy to read instructions and discreet connecting identification tags, and recyclable. And, because our bees will traveling overseas, reusable.

We did it! So fricken excited to come this far.