Aleksandra Sumner-Priilaid

Artist Catalogue

Virtual Exhibition

Group Catalogue Site

Towards Synchronicity

This exhibition explores the artist’s observations of a beehive kept in a secluded corner of the garden ofher childhood home. These  observations document spaces which lay bare the interactions between ‘the human’ and ‘the natural’.

This text serves to provide a short description of the works in this exhibition, namely: the Grid Painting, the Line book, the Bee Frame series, Return, Decaying frames and Langstroth frames. Additionally, the exhibition follows the journey of the artist’s beehive, from the bees’ decision to abandon the hive at the beginning of lockdown in March, (documented in the Bee Frame series) to their return in October (as seen in Return).

Key words:

The Langstroth Hive is the most common man-made beehive used throughout South Africa. It is characterized by vertically placed identical and interchangeable frames inside which the bees build their comb. This structure allows the beekeepers to remove and replace individual frames; maintaining the hive and harvesting honey.

Bee space is the measurement of 8mm observed by beekeepers and used to build commercial hives, including the Langstroth hive. It is an “air gap of about 8 mm between the frames or combs and the hive walls and covers”. This air gap “gives the bees freedom to move between and around the comb”.

“Unwanted comb is built” if there is an air gap wider than bee space, while “propolis is used to fill or block off narrower spaces”. In this way, ‘bee space’ is a tool used by beekeepers to govern the manufactured beehive, controlling where the bees build comb and make honey. It is a simplified unit that can measure the space we allocate to bees in the domestication of the natural world.

The Grid Painting

The Grid Painting merges the notion of bee space and human comprehension. It displays the natural space within the hive in a calculated, regimental and human manner. Through it, we make sense of the natural third space of the hive - which we cannot fully comprehend - as it is translated into a mathematically flattened space which we can.

The Grid Painting is a 2m x 1,6m primed canvas, onto which a tight graphite grid is drawn. It comprises of 50 000 8mm x 8mm squares perfectly mapped out on the surface. The figure 50 000 is significant as that is the number of bees in a healthy hive. This piece acts primarily to visualize what 50 000 units look like but also uses “bee space” as a measurement to relate these 50 000 units to the space of the hive.

The large proportions of the work, in contrast to the sea of minute units, engage with the human sense of  scale to expand upon the differences between our human perspective and that of the bees’. The primed white canvas, historically used as a space for representation, is used here to further contrast the conceptual space the Grid embodies.

The Line book

The Line book is a 20cm x 16cm hardcover notebook, covered with white gridded material, containing 50 pages. The surface area of every page is covered with thin horizontal blue koki lines, drawn by hand.

This creates the illusion of anonymous stretches of water through process- based production rather than observation, evoking a liminal space.

The book is 1:100 the size of the Grid Painting, with the total surface area of all the pages equalling the surface area of the Grid Painting. This multilevel mathematical use of scale reaches towards synchronicity.

The Bee Frame series

The Bee Frame series is a series of 20 oil paintings inside wooden bee frames. These frames relate directly in structure and number to the frames in the specific hive observed by the artist. The 12 larger frames sit in the lower larger section of the hive known as the brood box, while the 8 smaller frames sit in the shallower top section, called the super.

The repeating unit of the wooden honeycomb frame imitates the Langstroth frame. The paintings document the space inside the abandoned beehive, as well as the other creatures that reclaimed the vacant space. The space of the empty hive is then related to other spaces, observing small overlooked spaces that depict human interactions with the natural world. It is a meeting of what we cannot make sense of with what we have tried to tame.

Return

This short video piece documents the return of the bees to the previously vacant hive. Filmed on the evening of the discovery of the bees’ return to the hive, the viewer is held in suspense as we watch a single bee meander into view on its evening commute home as the sun sets. This short clip allows the viewer a glimpse of the serenity and relief as the natural life/death/life cycle is observed.

Decaying frames

This installation, juxtaposed with the Grid Painting, displays a collection of dismantled Langstroth frames piled against the wall. It depicts the deconstruction of the frame, extending to the human use of the grid, bringing to mind our destructive attempts and failure to charter and claim dominion over the natural world.

Langstroth frames

These are original frames out of the abandoned hive. Here we see the wooden structure of the Langstroth frames and the decaying comb, housing wax-moth cocoons, spiderwebs, decomposing pollen, nectar, honey and larvae.