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.