Public Art for Pollinators

As an artist and engineer, I am fascinated by the elegance of systems. Just at the  intersection of my passion for making contemporary art, and my study of mathematics,  is my architect’s creative mind—How can I build this? Once built, how can I activate it,  as a system? My heritage being crop farming in Eastern North Carolina, I have a  healthy respect for the labor of bees, who account for nearly 85% of the total  pollination our state’s agriculture is reliant upon. 

The Pollinator Hotel is an invitation into a story about the life of bees, while the  sculpture’s features help the bees locate and set up housekeeping in this refuge. This  hotel is an abstracted reinterpretation of a bee wing with a holographic black finish,  translating for our eyes the way bees perceive light—in iridescent, ultraviolet colors.  The delicate lattice wing structure is composed of lines duplicated over the path of  kinematic patterns, and echos the motion of beating wings.  

As well as being a home for bees, this design is a first-notion experiment in creating a  habitat from industrial materials, the likes of which we would see across the expanses  of Eastern North Carolina, when agriculture crops are replaced by photovoltaic panels,  and other energy farming materials. 

The design is a hybrid model of digital, laser cut steel fabrication and old-fashioned,  manual assembly. This sculpture will be placed on the sunflower field at Dix Park by crane. Most importantly, the several custom hotels this design houses for  native pollinators—mason, leaf-cutter, and carpenter bees—are situated in the cut-outs  of this larger-than-life sculpture. Two thousand native pollinators will spend their  winters in this hotel, making the piece itself technology in a system, and the bees part of the larger Dix Park ecosystem. 

Created in partnership with CAM Raleigh and generously funded by The Jandy Ammons Foundation.