While people are informed a lot about the importance of honeybees and the need to save them, there is little awareness about New Zealand’s native bees (ngaro huruhuru).
Dunedin artists Taarn Scott and Hana Pera Aoake (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Hinerangi me Ngāti Raukawa, Tainui/Waikato, Ngāti Waewae, Waitaha) believe the 28 native bee species are vital in understanding the country’s insect world in the face of challenges from climate change.
"We wanted to think alongside both of those different kinds of bee species that live here and how they contribute to giving us plants. Everything," Pera Aoake says.
The pair met when they shared a studio in Dunedin’s Stuart St and began collaborating around Covid, after discovering they worked in similar ways.
"A lot of our projects are a consideration of the non-human in the way that te taiao (natural world) is undergoing climate catastrophe. And what are the webs and links that we can look to in the natural world that can register a way we can come together, observe, learn and think about all of these living entities that exist all around us and continue despite the devastation of climate change."
The interest in bees has grown from their separate use of beeswax in their artistic practices, as both find it a nice material to work with.
Pera Aoake, who is also a writer and poet and is now based in Kawarau in the Eastern Bay of Plenty, began working with it when doing their master’s in Wellington when they discovered how malleable it was and its ability to be heated up and moulded.
"I was doing a lot of things where I was dipping paper with it. And then I would notice the way that so many bees would just end up in my studio attracted to it. And I thought that was really interesting. And I’d also done some work with honey, like painting walls with honey."
Scott, who is now based in Auckland, came to it through an interest in making candles and then string and wax sculptures.
"I really liked the scent of it. And I was also thinking about bee habitats. And so it felt sort of apt to work with beeswax. It’s quite like an interesting material in terms of how you get to play with it in both states, like liquid and solid. And if you’re sculpting, that’s quite interesting."
That led to research into the country’s native bees — which, while they do pollinate plants, are not used in apiculture. They mostly burrow into the ground or hollow plant stems, which means they are at risk from invasive species such as wasps and the recent incursion of hornets in Auckland.
"They’re always kind of at risk, but I guess are spoken about less. And we kind of wanted to imagine... what an art project would look like where we consider the importance of bees in the ecosystem."
It also seemed to be a nice symbiosis in that as a team the pair work a lot with clay, which native bees like to burrow into.
"And there’s this nice sort of idea of like creating habitat and then also working with your hands in terms of the materials we’ve brought into this show and project."
The project was developed while the artists were on a residency at Driving Creek, late potter Barry Brickell’s home and workplace on the Coromandel which is surrounded by bush.
"It was nice because we were able to make together collaboratively and be in the same space."
The area had a lot of bees and native bees, so they were able to see them in their natural habitat every day. It was a known risk that if any of the potters left their work outside to dry, they will find lots of spiders in it when they return the next day.
"Because native bees will nest in, say, the spout and they have a certain venom that stings the spiders. They’re not dead, but they basically feed their young live spiders."
Initially they began looking at habitats they could create that would attract bees so they started making bricks out of clay from the Coromandel structures with holes in them.
"We’ve made a lot of bricks. So the bee bricks sort of have like nesting holes created in them. Sort of inspired by what those sort of things could look like in urban environments.
The bricks will be stacked in hive-like structures for the exhibition.
As bees are very attracted to brighter colours, especially blue, the pair began to look at the spectrum of colours that insects are attracted to. The exhibition room will also be painted a bright, bold "fun" blue.
"The colour blue is quite interesting in the natural world, in that it’s such a rarity. And I guess there’s been so many artists and writers who’ve written whole books about the colour blue."
So they began searching out blue stones and ceramic chips that were everywhere at Driving Creek to include into mosaics and tiles they began making as a way to attract the bees to the bricks.
"We were just picking up all these broken bits of ceramics, and then sticking them into clay. But it was a quite a really purposeful kind of intention of, like, thinking about the histories of making in that space, and of, you know, bringing that into the work," Pera Aoake says.
The mosaics were initally created from ceramics the pair had made in the past that they had no use for any more or did not like.
"And so we brought a bunch of things that we didn’t like and smashed them with a sledgehammer."
It was a bit of an experiment to see how old bits of ceramics melded with new clay, both raw from the environment and storebought.
"Some worked, some things didn’t work, some things cracked. "
Scott says they were not too "superfixed" on the outcome.
"So we sort of are happy to let the object sort of decide where it goes."
"It’s an experiment, and you have to relinquish control in some ways. And I think so much of other kinds of art making is very precise, whereas this speaks to our kind of intuitive way of working with materials, and trying to see, stretch what they can do and what they can’t do."
They also found the history of the Coromandel area and the impacts caused by mining really interesting.
"Taarn and I are really interested in the ways in which industry have shaped Aotearoa, and what that does to the natural environment, and to ecosystems that exist here for a reason. And I think thinking about these extractive practices also feeds into thinking about ngaro huruhuru, because even just thinking about the mining that they want to do in the Coromandel, that will wipe out frogs that are as big as my pinky — that’s going to have a devastating impact on the environment," Pera Aoake says.
The work Brickell had done over many years showed how art and ecology could go hand in hand. They have also been influenced by the work of ecologist Geoff Park (1946-2009), in particular The Groves of Life, in which he talked a lot about the reshaping of New Zealand’s ecology through colonial contact and industry.
"His texts were really crucial for both of us when we started reading them."
They realised how much growing up in Dunedin has shaped the ways they make art. Pera Aoake says while they love Dunedin and being from the city, they also felt it was strange there was little representation of Ngāi Tahu in it although it has been slowly changing over recent years.
"For so long, it just felt, I’m from Dunedin. It’s Gaelic for Edinburgh. But, you know, it was like this beautiful marshland that had all of these beautiful kahikātea trees that were all taken, reclaimed and turned into something else."
As well as ceramics, the pair have done some bronze casting and are including a reading nook where people can go to read and reflect. Queenstown’s public library is supplying books about bees, insects and climate change. They have also comissioned Dunedin writer Robyn Maree Pickens to write a piece for the exhibition. It is hoped that by using an insect like the bee that people recognise and have interactions with they can open up conversations with people about how land and its people have changed through colonisation.
Both are excited to be back in the south showing their work to a southern audience.
TO SEE
"Let the Honey Soak Through", Te Atamira Whakaari, February 11-April 27.
