Bee Kingdom members (L to R) Ryan Marsh Fairweather, Timothy Belliveau, and Phillip Bandura working together in their hot shop. Not pictured: Kai Scholefield.
GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet: What are you working on?
Bee Kingdom: Right now myself (Tim Belliveau) and fellow Bee Kingdom members (Ryan Marsh Fairweather, Kai Scholefield, Phillip Bandura) are working on our next traveling exhibition. It involves a lot of prototyping in the studio as these pieces are all pretty new. We have an ongoing collaborative project known as “Weathermachines,” which is a series made up of a constantly growing mythology and world of “mechatronic beings” delivered through blown glass sculpture, digital illustration, and creative writing. Weathermachines is a body of work conceived by Ryan Marsh Fairweather.
Joobas, from the "Weathermachines" series, was displayed in a Bee Kingdom exhibition at the Ruberto-Ostberg Gallery in Calgary in March 2011.
We also all do personal work. In my newest work, I’ve been making small glass landscapes with figurative elements. I’ve been traveling a lot recently and looking at landscape from airplane windows so creating miniatures comes from that aerial perspective. The pieces all end up on platforms and make up installations so there’s a fair bit of construction involving wood, metal and paint finishes.
Bee Kingdom, Mythopoet, 2010. H 22, W 8, D 8 in. photo: michael lipsett.
GLASS: What have you seen recently that inspired you?
Bee Kingdom: What’s inspiring me right now (Tim) is what I’m reading. I stumbled across some alchemical texts a while ago and the imagery they describe is pretty amazing. Alchemy has a great way of animating everything; nature and chemical changes are all allegories. In glass, you deal with a very animated material that’s changing constantly; it has historical roots in alchemy. Also Buddhist Thangka paintings, Adventure Time (the animated series) and Alejandro Jodorwoski’s Holy Mountain (1973) film have been great sources of inspiration for me. My studio mates and I have been working with character-based art for a number of years now and it allows for a lot of influences like these to play into the forms and ideas employed.
The members of Bee Kingdom not in the studio (L to Rt: Tim Belliveau, Ryan Marsh Fairweather, Kai Scholefield, Phillip Bandura.
GLASS: Do you have any exhibitions coming up that you can talk about?
Bee Kingdom: Our work can be seen here in Calgary at DaDe Gallery, and we’ll be announcing venues for the next show in the new year. Our group website is: www.beekingdom.ca.