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https://reasonstobecheerful.world/pollinator-pathmaker-alexandra-daisy-ginsberg-art/>
"Imagine for a moment you could perceive the world like a bee. Bees have the
fastest color vision in the animal world, about five times faster than humans’,
enabling them to navigate the world with extreme efficiency and speed. While
humans might let their gaze wander over a flower field and appreciate the
colors, bees perceive each individual flower as they zip by. Also, if you were
a bee, you couldn’t see red, but you would see ultraviolet light humans can’t
see, so you’d be able to detect ultraviolet flower colors. Bees actually have
five eyes; three additional smaller eyes called ocelli help them navigate, a
bee’s version of GPS.
“The superpowers they have make me feel so inadequate,” Alexandra Daisy
Ginsberg says at her art studio at the Somerset House in London. “I can’t see
polarized light; I can’t see the electric charge of flowers; I can’t smell the
scent plumes from fields of flowers in the distance. I can’t memorize the
locations of all the flowers I visited, and that’s just a small list of my
failings as a human.”
Ginsberg’s journey into researching how pollinators perceive the world started
in the spring of 2020, when the British artist was asked to design a sculpture
to raise awareness about pollinators. “Instead of making a sculpture about
pollinators, I thought it would be better to make a sculpture for pollinators,”
she says, and points to studies that show a decline of 75 percent of
pollinators over 27 years in Germany due to insecticides, pests and climate
change. The data from other countries is similar. “That led me to the question,
What do pollinators like? What would they enjoy?” she explains.
The result was the first
Pollinator Pathmaker Edition, a 180-foot-long
permanent garden installation with 7,000 plants at the Eden Project, Cornwall,
that opened as part of the
Create a Buzz project in 2021. In 2022 Ginsberg
added 11 meandering beds in Kensington Gardens, London, and in 2023, a garden
in the front yard of the Natural History Museum in Berlin followed by 15
community gardens around Berlin."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
