Monthly Archives: December 2015

Great website with information on North American insects: Bug Guide

(pre-caffeine scattershot morning meditation on … conservation/community/the decline of/and impending loss of/the natural?)

how to do it won’t matter when the sun stops shining through slats on the neighbour’s deck peaking out towards the recycling – big blue shining bin – and the afterword, the aftermath of all that was never left to be sliding down the sides of the walls. In the corner by the red doors, new with pains of glass and broken stairwells marking out the vicinity of where we all abide. Should there be more than what is inside an individual – is a singular thing or a monster – bring on the backyard banquets and football Sundays, potatoes, creamed salads and baked beginnings of the last days of our culture riding out the end zone of some sport we all learned to play before we were able to memorize the universal rule book. Bad analogies and cropped pants, ladies in spring’s latest colours, it’s the heat of the light baking the passage to what is comfortable, secure and desired. Oh how? Communication fostering common portrayals of what the worst of us all could be – if it were scripted executives and prime time come-ons – perfectly coiffed and barely believable. Ass in the char, Ass in the chair, Ass on fire? Figure it out. The waiting game cannot continue, the hours of the journey to the end of what we would like to have had already transpired beginnings or endings and ergo ergo ergo what things have no productive value … productivity and bees with their little knees collapsing across America, or, the organism knows the way … method, matriculation, one sphere to another little known mentally agreeable moment in the backwaters of how are you doing today my friends?

I had the pleasure of going to Vancouver to meet Cameron Cartiere, Megan Smetzer and Brian Campbell from the Pollinator Pasture team in Richmond. They took me to the Richmond Art Gallery to see Cameron Cartiere’s For All Is For Yourself, an installation which will be coming to the Kelowna Art Gallery!

Photo by G. Campbell

They hosted paper making workshops with members of the local community, embedded the paper with pollinator seeds and then laser cut the paper into 10,000 silhouettes of the Western Bumblebee.

Western Bumble Bee
Photo by G. Cambell

Behind the bees on the wall are giant laser cut images of wild bee homes. I’d never seen a wild bee home before and they look like little clusters of burnt, caramel popcorn. So neat! Pollinator pastures will create a space where wild bees can make their nests – loss of habitat is a huge problem for wild bees.

Photo by G. Campbell

I brought some of our Gaillardia seeds with me from Kelowna so Jamie Johnson (the paper maker) can test them out and see how they will work/look in the paper we will be making in Kelowna over the winter and fall for our 5,000 laser cut bees that will join 5,000 of the Richmond bees when they come to the Kelowna Art Gallery.

Photo by G. Campbell

The seed embedded paper bees will be given to community members to take home and plant in their garden. They will also be used to plant the Pollinator Pasture.

The other show that was up in the Richmond Gallery was jasna guy’s not by chance alone … a beautiful installation. She used paper that she dipped in beeswax and the whole gallery space had this beautiful smell from the beeswax. The smell comes from all the flowers the bees gathered pollen. It never occurred to me that the smell of beeswax comes from the flowers! Seems obvious now though, ha-ha! The other piece jasna did was create a series of colour samples with all the colours that pollen can be. Another learning moment for me … I always assumed that pollen was just yellow! Check out jasna guy’s website for pictures and more information about her process.

Getting Gaillardia seeds ready for our paper-making workshops!

Gaillardia is a drought-tolerant, pollinator attracting and long-blooming blanket flower that is well suited to the Okanagan.