Corpus Melliferous: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Draw Pictures

After spending four years in various and sundry drawing courses at NSCAD I had developed somewhat of a complex about my drawing. “Your drawing could use some work.” and “Your drawing isn’t strong.” were repeated themes in all of my drawing courses. I don’t mean to call for sympathy in admitting this; I acknowledged that my instructors were quite correct; my drawings had always lacked a certain level of technical accuracy. The drawings themselves weren’t bad but my “drawing”: my technical ability to reproduce things as I saw them was definitely lacking.  So as much I understood this difference and as much as I was able to improve my skills, my drawing ability remained something to be desired. I lost confidence and I stopped enjoying making drawings and, for the most part, I stopped making drawings altogether.

In an advanced painting course, some time close to graduation, I learned that there are ways around this shortcoming; I had options! After all, Mary Fucking Pratt (I believe that is her real middle name.) uses an overhead projector to block in her incredible paintings and Chuck God-Damned Close does incredible work using grids! But still, dear reader, I was ashamed! *melodramatic weeping* What was I to do?!

For years I avoided drawing, making only the most rudimentary sketches to plan the compositions of my paintings. I would use grids to block in images from photos for my paintings and hoped there would be no follow-up questions. I felt that I was “getting away with it” but companion to this feeling is the surety that eventually, my proverbial “jig” would be “up”.  And, deep down, I somehow felt cheated; like the robot who couldn’t love, I was the somewhat anticlimactic artist version: I was the painter who couldn’t actually draw all that well.

So, fast-forward a few years to the Fall of 2010. I decided to rent a studio space outside of my apartment and dedicate its use to, among several other things, facing down my drawing demon and befriending it. I wanted to feel comfortable drawing; I wanted to love drawing for itself. I wanted to be like Richard Gere at the end of An officer and a Gentleman and carry the blushing, Debra Winger of drawing out of that damned factory and  “away from all of this.” I had a plan too. I was going to embrace the aspects of creating images by hand that I really enjoyed and push them to their furthest logical conclusion. I love making large work, I love dense texture and I love brain-numbing repetition and, dear reader, as you already know, I dearly love bees.

Of note: my studio space was VERY small, roughly the size of a standard prison cell (I’m not even kidding). It had no windows. As I began to spend more and more time in this claustrophobic space, I descended into a kind of useful madness. I was alone in a very tiny room with no distractions and nothing but my work, how glorious! Things made sense that hadn’t made sense before and I was able to comfortably move slightly away from straight representation and make some visual connections that were slightly more surreal. This break allowed me the comfort to dig in and have fun with brain numbing repetition of form and desperately tedious texture work.

I began experimenting with making large, surreal, bee works on paper. I became deeply fascinated with the only obvious thing that humans and bees had in common physiologically: we both have hair! The drawings were made as large as I could manage given the size of the space. Since the longest wall was eight feet long, my drawings measured five feet high (the height of a roll of paper) by eight feet long. I worked on them standing, crouching and sitting cross-legged on the floor. I worked on them eight hours at a time; I developed carpal tunnel; I loved the hell out of it! Each drawing ended up taking about a hundred and fifty hours to complete and, miraculously, I liked how they looked so much that I stopped painting and really dug in to drawing.

These drawings are still an ongoing series called Corpus Melliferous. So far I’ve shown them at Artists' Quarter Gallery and Studios (remind me to post some time about putting on an exhibition by oneself), The Hub, and The Confederation Centre of the Arts. I’m hoping to find a venue to show more work from this series soon so you can see them in real life but until then here are the most recent pieces. Photo documented by the incredible Christina Arsenault.

53'' x 38'', graphite, watercolour-pencil and ink on paper

38'' x 53'', graphite, watercolour-pencil and ink on paper

Hive

Many thanks to Kylee Nunn, a brilliant local photographer, for the dreamy documentation of the installed piece.

I think we all, as creative people have our dream projects that given the opportunity, we simply must make. Hive is and was one of those projects for me. As I’ve mentioned before, art-making, at its core for me is creating an opportunity for others to see the world in a different way. Providing a situation of right-brain-strangeness and the subsequent dialogue about this strangeness is definitely one of the things that gives me the most pleasure in life.

Hive has been an idea at the back of my mind for the past four or five years. It would provide an all encompassing, overwhelming, full sensory experience for a broad public audience. The basic idea consisted of creating a large-scale installation where visitors would be given the opportunity to experience the darkness, warmth, sound, sights, smells and vibrations of a living beehive. As one small person with a lot of creative scope but with limited skills in the audio-visual world of sound and video projections this project had been just outside of my grasp but always on my mind.

Fast forward to last Winter when I had the great pleasure of getting to know Jeff Wheaton. The art world is a very small place, compound that reality a few times by the fact that Halifax is a tiny place and another few times by the fact that artists whose work obsesses particularly on bees are almost certainly bound to cross paths and there you have it, an inevitable collaboration! Jeff was the filmmaker in residence with the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative. The film that he was creating for the residency was, non-coincidentally, also called Hive. This film is a gorgeous, gorgeous creation and features my bee taxidermy as part of the storyline. I strongly encourage you to check it out, but I digress. Turns out that Jeff and I had both been tapping into the bee ether and both wanted to make a large scale installation along similar lines and so we decided to join forces and create a piece for Nocturne Art at Night, 2013.

Through a lot of brainstorming over the next months we slowly came up with a workable concept for Hive.  The idea of a full sensory experience was at the core of each of our ideas, it was just exactly how this would take physical form that needed a little bit of smoothing out. As the naive dreamer I would wildly shoot out my ideas and Jeff , who knew what equipment and tools we would actually need to achieve our goals, would accurately point out that we “…weren’t Cirque de Soleil”.  In very short order we agreed on the idea that became Hive.  A large yurt, 28’ in diameter would make up the shell of our hive. We would then build a large cylinder that would occupy the centre of the inside of the yurt.  This cylinder would be constructed of organic cotton and wouId be fully impregnated with beeswax which, turns out, is a great surface to back-project video! Inside the cylinder three projectors would play original footage from Jeff’s backyard beehives (Did I mention that Jeff is an award winning cinematographer?) while several large speakers would pump out sound that was also recorded directly from these hives. The rest of the yurt would be blacked out so that the viewer’s full attention would be drawn to the centre and, we hoped, they would become lost in the experience.

Here's an arial shot from my balcony of Tim Tracey helping me out with the construction of the wax cylinder. Jason Goodyear also spent a good length of time helping me out with this project.  The cylinder was a bit of a monster  at twelve feet high and thirty feel long. Brushing and then ironing hot wax onto every inch of its surface was a bit of a back breaking task. You know who your friends are when they're willing to help you build your giant crazy art monolith. 

Here's a process shot of the cylinder set up in a big warehouse with Jeff for scale.  

So this is exactly what we ended up making and it existed as an installation for six hours on the night of October 19^th, 2013 in the Atlantic Filmmaker’s Cooperative parking lot at 5663 Cornwallis Street in North End Halifax. Jeff and I both donned beekeeping outfits and were present to “tend” our hive and field questions about it for the duration of the installation. Hundreds of people came out to see our strange beehive and we had many rewarding conversations with many of the hive’s temporary inhabitants.

A huge shout out of thanks to Martha Cooley and the staff, board and volunteers at the Atlantic Filmmaker's Cooperative who made this project possible through providing a venue, equipment, technical expertise and support.

I hope to recreate this project in a gallery setting or at a festival again soon. Ill keep you posted about this, oh yes!

Kreb

A year and a half ago I received an offer I simply could not refuse: would I like to be a collaborating artist on a stop motion animation project? The question came from my Centre for Art Tapes Scholarship Program mentor Tim Tracey who had won the Helen Hill award for animation for his proposed project Kreb. Kreb sounded like it was right up my alley: creatures and sets would be made exclusively from found and reclaimed materials and the subject matter would have a strong thematic and visual link to my bee taxidermy series, namely: the perversion of the natural world through technology, pollution and rampant industrialization.

What followed was a whirlwind of building, planning and crazy times. Sets were constructed out of discarded electronics, wires, hose, cogs and wheels and basically any gorgeous rusty old thing that suited the Kreb universe. This miniature world was unique, quirky, filthy and beautiful. Creatures were brainstormed and built using computer parts, wire, animal bones and any lovely detritus that we could find.  Chris Macnutt (Who is quite possibly the most patient human I have ever met.) put many hours into creating brilliant and stunning machines that turned and whirred in the background of every scene and added so much beauty and richness to all of the sets. Jason Johnson built the characters Kreb and The Baby. The hours I spent animating these tiny characters gave me a real sense of wonder at the painstaking detail that was put into them.  Tim Tracey, who conceived of and written the story  and who’s “baby” this project is, spent many hundreds of hours assembling the Kreb universe, building sets and creatures, animating, lighting and light painting and rallying us, his troops to battle! I worked on concept designs, built creatures, helped dress and light sets and worked on all of the small things in a literal sense: my specialty (in this project and in life) is in strange cyborg miniatures. I would be completely remiss if I didn't mention Joshua Van Tassel who wrote a gorgeous, wonderfully original and heavily industrial sounding soundtrack for Kreb; this soundtrack united all of the visual elements and set the emotional tone beautifully! There are many many other contributors to the planning and building stage including Ed Beals and Susan Tooke. Not the least of these contributors was Ami Goto who provided the warmth of her company and her incredible cooking and was always there to give helpful feedback as we worked. It was definitely a village-raised child of a quirky, endearing and simultaneously terrifying, miniature universe. And this is just mentioning the wonderful humans that I worked directly with!

(Anecdotally, I would be utterly remiss if I didn’t send a shout out to the Wu Tang Clan, specifically The 36 Chambers album. Without this album I fear I would have descended into total madness and I’m absolutely certain that the cumulative hours of dancing I did to Wu between takes prevented me from developing deep vein thrombosis and subsequently dying. Thanks Wu, I owe you my life!)

Finally, everything was assembled and we were ready to shoot!  For a staunch luddite like me, this part presented a serious learning curve. Each shot had to be painstakingly lit and each movement had to be carefully measured. The resultant images were stored in sequence on a series of laptops and hard drives and were then assembled into an animation through a specialized computer program.

Shooting became a sort of meditation: measure, move, take a picture, measure, move, take a picture. Turns out there’s a part of my lizard brain that loves this kind of desperate tedium. And so, day after day we would put sets together and light them and night after night we would carefully film our story, one move and one picture at a time.  If I hadn’t been excited about what we were making already, I became doubly so as our footage started to slowly assemble. I don’t think you really understand “slow” until your stop-animate at twenty-four frames/second. But the company was good and the work was very very satisfying. Martin Helmich came in as our director of photography at this point and the storytelling was pushed to exciting new limits because of his muti-dimentional re-imagining of the Kreb universe through the lens of the camera. Brett Hannam, a saintly man of many talents sat in on some of the insanity of our shoots and spent countless hours capturing footage, solving technical problems and eventually taking on the task of being the project’s producer.

The resultant film is a project that I am definitely very proud to have been able to play a role in creating. I’d love to show it to you but it’s still making the rounds at festivals. As soon as I can, I’ll post a link!

Here are the festivals where Kreb has played so far:

World premier: Atlantic Film Festival. September 2013, Halifax

Kreb received a special award for animation.

Outlier Film Festival, November 2013, Halifax 

First Glance Film Festival, April 2014, LA

Worldfest Independent Film Festival, April 2014, Texas

Kreb was awarded a Platinum Remi Award for animation.

Bee Taxidermy Instructional Video

So, what do you do when you have virtually no technical skill in shooting and editing video or recording audio but you really, really  want to make an instructional video about bee taxidermy? You seek help! What better opportunity to learn these skills but through the Centre for Art Tapes’ Scholarship Program? So I wrote up a proposal and was accepted into the program.

I would recommend this program to anyone. If you have project you dearly want to make but lack the technical camera and computer skills to do it, please please apply for the CFAT Scholarship program! The instructors, CFAT staff and mentors are so patient and welcoming and they took me from the point of not even knowing which button to push to “make the camera go” to being able to now independently produce my own video work.

This program consists of a series of workshops about everything from camera operation to the basics of animation to lighting to sound and video editing. The program climaxes in a public screening of the work that the scholarship participants produce. Scholarship recipients are also given great access to equipment and services available through the centre. Another component consists of being set up with a mentor who, through a series of scheduled studio visits and meetings acts as an instructor and helps to guide you through the process. My assigned mentor was Tim Tracey: self-made filmmaker and DIY ninja extraordinaire! Tim was a wacky and wonderful mentor and it turned out that we worked so well together that we ended up working on another project after the scholarship program concluded. However, I must digress at this point because the project in question will be covered in some detail in a future post.

So here I was with a plan and the ignorant hubris to think my project was a very simple, straightforward endeavor that could easily be completed in a weekend. I expected that after this effortless two days I would put my feet up and sip large, fruity cocktails from coconuts while nodding sympathetically at the other, more ambitious scholars who were toiling away on their Citizens’ Kane. 

I was very soon to learn that this was simply not the case. Apparently shooting in macro can be a bit of a challenge *cough*. Every part of the shoot was incredibly painstaking because, turns out, it’s kind of difficult to shoot video of activities you can’t actually see very well with the naked eye.  Imagine winding a tiny wire onto a tiny needle and then very carefully trying to locate a specific part of a bee’s tiny head to glue it to; all this occurring while one is trying to record the minute sounds this activity might make and trying one’s very best to capture this minute activity on camera. Not to mention lighting: suffice to say that I had never before concentrated more energy on trying not to melt myself or other people. Tears were shed, lessons were learned and fingers were super-glued to other fingers on a semi regular basis. But the video was made, oh yes! No longer would the world’s hobbyists be deprived of the option of preserving and repairing heirloom quality dead bees for their family to treasure for generations to come.

My plan at the time was to exhibit this video alongside several hundred taxidermy bees. I have yet to do this but it is still a very real ambition about which, I will keep you posted!

And so, my darlings, here is my bee taxidermy instructional opus. Like, share and enjoy!

Bee Taxidermy Instructional Video