SARAH KEIRLE

Sculpture by Natasha Dettman and Nissen Richards Studio, Audio by Sarah Keirle

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The Pollinator Pavilion was a walk-in sculpture created for the Skipton Big Ideas Exhibition by ArtHouse Jersey. The audio below is a binaural version of a four-channel sound installation.

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The soundtrack was created using field recordings of Jersey honeybees at Samares Manor. Most of the recordings were taken by placing a microphone inside a bee hive and leaving it alone for an hour. Every sound you hear was created using the sounds of bees.

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The work pays homage to the vital pollinator of all our food crops, the honeybee, which pollinates thousands of flowers on its nectar-collecting journeys. To produce just one gram of wax, a honeybee needs to consume eight grams of honey, making wax a precious resource.

The energy-conscious honeybee is a master of ecological design. The Pollinator Pavilion takes its inspiration from the cell structures in which bees nest and store honey. A hexagonal grid or honeycomb is the best way to divide a 2D surface into regions of equal area with the least total perimeter.

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The installation is constructed from concentric hexagonal layers of cardboard tubes which rise steeply, echoing the church organ pipes which it sits in front of. It was built by Jim Oxenham.

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