For All Is For Yourself is an art installation of 10,000 paper bumblebees and the public is invited to help to make the seed-embedded paper to create this beautiful project.
On Thursday, February 4th, between 6 and 9 PM at the Kelowna Art Gallery, community members can help make sheets of handmade paper embedded with Gaillardia seed. Once made, the seed paper will be laser-cut into thousands of stylized western bumblebees to be installed on the walls of the Kelowna Art Gallery in June 2016. While people of all ages can just drop in, we do encourage advance registration for this event: public-papermaking-workshop.eventbrite.ca
Paper-making workshops are the first phase of For All is For Yourself, a community art project and gallery exhibition being held at the Kelowna Art Gallery from June 24 to October 14th 2016. Part of the exhibition is a wall of laser-cut bumblebees made of paper that has been created by members of the community. In October, members of the community and those who helped to make the paper will be encouraged to take some of the paper bees home to plant in their garden for local pollinators. Gaillardia is a drought-resistant flower that bees visit in the Okanagan’s hot summer months.
For All Is For Yourself: A Poetic Expression of the Labour of Bees is a work created by Cameron Cartiere and the chART collective of Richmond BC with the support of Kelowna’s Public Art Pollinator Pasture Project. The installation is composed of 10,000 bumblebees made from the seed paper, half of these coming from Richmond and half being made here in Kelowna. The installation at the gallery will then be the focus of several community engagement projects from June till October. In the final stage of the exhibition, participants and visitors will be encouraged to take the bees away to plant in their own gardens – creating new bee friendly habitats and allowing the hive to literally “swarm” out of the gallery.
For more information about the project, see borderfreebees.com or contact Nancy Holmes of the Public Art Pollinator Project nancy.holmes@ubc.ca or 250-764-9666.