Tag Archives: gampi and beeswax

pressed for time 2018

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Installation shot, Pressed for Time, Seymour Art Gallery.
Photo credit: Kara Wightman

The exhibition I am sharing with entomologist and friend, Lincoln Best opened on Sunday at the Seymour Art Gallery in North Vancouver. We had a great time at the vernissage! Thank you to all of you who came out to see the show. Exhibition continues at the gallery until July 21, 2018.

We are offering 2 workshops in tandem with this show–the first is on Sunday June 17, from 2-4 pm. A free drop-in drawing and printmaking workshop with artist Cyndy Chwelos, for participants of all ages. Everyone welcome!

The second free workshop is on Saturday, June 30, at 2:00 pm. Artist and author, Lori Weidenhammer (aka Madame Beespeaker) of Victory Gardens for Bees fame, and educator and naturalist Erin Udal will engage participants in an interactive, fun workshop on identifying native bees and gardening for pollinators!  Registration for this workshop is suggested and can be made through Seymour Art Gallery

 

Projection of Thimbleberry blossom: part of the exhibition.

I placed a blossom on my scanner to see what would happen to the anthers — would the blossom die, would the anthers open and shed their pollen?  Leaving the blossom on the scanner, I scanned the progress of development over several hours and then joined the still images into a video. (With many thanks for Ace Media for the video help).

Bees in Sun Valley 2018

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I had the great privilege of being part of a group exhibition at the Sun Valley Center Gallery in Ketchum, Idaho. Here are some photos from the installation. I am showing 3 different but interconnected bodies of work here: the botanical imagery, a section of the printmaking piece from 2015, “not by chance alone,” and some of the pollen work I did based on Dorothy Hodges’ book, “Pollen Loads of the Honeybee.”

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flutter

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Sorting through piles and piles of old work, more precisely the cast off sheets of imagery on gampi from the large bee-themed work from 2015, I started to play with the materials; exploring, in a sketchbook, the idea of collections, of possessing nature. Specimens, both botanical and entomological, are instrinsic parts of my new work, and I am reflecting upon my own need to see nature as a collectible entity.

 

gleaning, sorting, printing, considering

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As the season of bee observation, floral collection and study draws to a close, I am starting to look through my image archive, considering the printed ones, what to keep, what to set aside–what thematics to consider in preparation for next year’s exhibitions? Soon, I will be starting the intensive task of printing new images, most probably with the help of a new Epson printer, as I have devastated my present one with the abundantly free-floating fibers in the gampi paper I use.

But despite the hate-hate relationship of gampi+printer, the paper is lovely to work with, and because it is not coated, there is not the same sharpness in the image that real photography paper has. It has a natural warm hue. These aspects I really like.

Then the long, slow task of dipping each image in melted beeswax. The paper is already translucent, but the beeswax renders it more so, and adds a further warmth to the tone.

gampi

after dipping in beeswax