first blog

By Michael Blow | Published: 11th March 2019

I thought I would start a blog, in part as a way to revisit some of my earlier pieces that I’ve always meant to put up but never have for various reasons and so I can start what I hope will be something like a creative diary of current projects. I don’t know if anyone will read this but I sculpt for myself as much as anyone else so I have very little to lose by sharing my work and some thoughts here…..enjoy.

So back in 2015 I was commisioned to make a sculpture for a building development in Chipping Sodbury. In the original scope for the project they mentioned various aspects of Chipping Sodbury that they thought would be of interest, The Mop Fair, various historical aspects including the market town and a community beehive project that was being run locally. I decided to use the beehive in the theme as bees are a favourite of mine and over the previous few years the plight of bees had been in my mind and the press a lot. They are still suffering from falling numbers and sudden hive collapse, we rely so heavily on these hard working pollinators that it seems ridiculous we’re not doing more to prevent their demise along with so many more of our insects all of which are essential to our eco system which itself is starting to creak under the strain of our relentless need for growth.

I ran a workshop in St John’s Mead Primary School with the year 5 pupils. I took in some pictures of bees and beehives as a starting point and asked the children to produce some drawings and captions that I could use as inspiration for my piece. As you can see they produced some lovely pictures and best of all were the captions. I used a number of these round the outside. For the main sculpture I used a striking image of both the bee wing and the honeycomb tessellation to design a piece that was both visually stimulating and hard-hitting.

The children were certainly aware of the problems facing Bees at this time (and I bet they were striking for climate change too) and some of the captions they gave me were spot on,

Bees don’t want money they want honey!!

Here are the picture of the finished piece. I hope you like them. It went down well on the North Bristol Art trail that year.

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