Bee Kingdom from left to right: Tim Belliveau, Philip Bandura, Kai Georg Scholefield, Ryan Marsh Fairweather; photo courtesy: www.beekingdom.ca
Berlin is famous for hosting more artists per capita than most other major cities, but until recently they were lacking in facilities for making sculpture from glass. If you caught GLASS Quarterly #124 Fall 2011, then you read about Nadania Idriss‘ vision come into fruition for Berlin’s first open access glass studio. After searching for the right space at the right price, and enlisting various international artists to assist with the development, Berlin Glas e.V. (the German acronym for a non-profit organisation) welcomed viewers and participants to its soft opening in December of last year. The question is, now what?
Though Berlin does not have a history with glass as a viable contemporary artistic medium (save for what Idriss refers to as “exceptions” such as Ann Wolff) it certainly is a hotbed for international artistic collaboration. This is where Bee Kingdom of Calgary, Alberta, Canada come in. Idriss was made aware of founding members, Ryan Marsh Fairweather, Philip Bandura,Tim Belliveau, and Kai Georg Scholefield while studying art history in Seattle, Washington. The foursome were guest artists at Pilchuck in 2008, and Bandura tells Brad Copping of Canadian Contemporary Glass, “we have been showing for her ever since.” When Idriss first opened a gallery in Germany’s capital, New Glass Art & Photography, Bee Kingdom was offered an exhibition there in September of 2010 titled, “Soft Power.” Their collaborative efforts have escalated with the Kingdom’s interest in her latest endeavor and her need for self-starting glass artists with a background in grassroots art making. She even enlisted Ryan Marsh Fairweather to design the logo for Berlin Glas e.V. – a bear holding a glass blowpipe.
Now Bee Kingdomers Philip Bandura and Tim Belliveau are staying full-time in Germany, splitting their hive in half while expanding it exponentially with public outreach and European glass showcases. They have plans to remain in and around Berlin Glas for the next year at least, communicating with Canadian-bound hivers predominantly through email and Skype. They also continue to collaborate with Kai and Ryan across the world by building compatible glass components for a singular project and mailing them back and forth, a time consuming artistic process reminiscent of the musical endeavors of The Postal Service.
Contact with working artists in Germany such as Robin Rhode (South Africa) and Julius Weiland (Germany) give credibility to the brand new studio as it finds its footing in a city where glass is mostly viewed as “kitsch.” Bee Kingdom is prepared to get city grants underway for Canadian and international artists to live and work in the studio, much like their Calgary model. Says Bandura in his Canadian Contemporary Glass interview, “We already had the experience of building a studio and running it full-time in Calgary…and we had been looking for the next step to take as a collective that would allow us to expand our knowledge of glass, artistically as well as administratively. Berlin Glas e.V. was exactly the next step we were looking for.”
-Katharine Morales