Artists Commissions

We would like to welcome the following artists to the Outrider Project –

Ron Haselden  www.ronhaselden.com

Bee Flight Paths. Time exposure photographs. Postcard Series 

 

Cath Keay   http://research.ncl.ac.uk/sacs/projects/Keayimage6.html

Riddrie Vogue (2005) Image shows beeswax sculpture being transformed by bees. 25 x 25 x 12 cm.

 

Jane Tudge  http://www.janetudge.com/index.html?refresh=

Waxworks-edge-no-2

 

Megan Powell   http://cargocollective.com/megan-powell/Full 

“Full” a film collaboration with Carol Mavor, to be completed 2014

 

Elisabeth Bond  www.elisabethbond.com 

Landfill

 

Early Career Artist include

Anneka French  www.annekafrench.wordpress.com

Becca Harris  www.artstheword.com 

 

 

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Honeybees abandoning hives and dying due to insecticide use…

The above photograph is from the Watkins Collection at Hereford Library.

The mysterious vanishing of honeybees from hives can be directly linked to insectcide use, according to new research from Harvard University. The scientists showed that exposure to two neonicotinoids, the world’s most widely used class of insecticide, lead to half the colonies studied dying, while none of the untreated colonies saw their bees disappear.

“We demonstrated that neonicotinoids are highly likely to be responsible for triggering ‘colony collapse disorder’ in honeybee hives that were healthy prior to the arrival of winter,” said Chensheng Lu, an expert on environmental exposure biology at Harvard School of Public Health and who led the work.

The loss of honeybees in many countries in the last decade has caused widespread concern because about three-quarters of the world’s food crops require pollination. The decline has been linked to loss of habitat, disease and pesticide use. In December 2013, the European Union banned the use of three neonicotinoids for two years.

Honeybees abandoning hives and dying due to insecticide use, research finds | Environment | theguardian.com

1935

outrider

‘Thats why Alfred Watkins, author of The Old Straight Track, apologist for ley lines, man of business, haunted this country. It had been the locus for his original revelation: everything connects and, in making those connections, streams of energy are activated. You learn to see. You forget to forget, to inhibit conditioned reflexes. You access the drift. Watkins was an outrider, a brewer’s rep. If he were still in the game he’d be jockeying a Ford Mondeo around the motorway system, stumbling on the karma of the M25, speculating on London’s orbital road as a prayer wheel, a dream-generator on which the psychic health of the city depended.’ From Landor’s Tower: Or the Imaginary Conversations by Iain Sinclair.

the pioneer

‘He lives in poverty, his days and nights wholly devoted to his labours. He dies in poverty, never having been able to sell his precious collections. He was forty-three years old when he died. But he had discovered, among a hundred others, this one profound truth, which entirely overthrew the conception then current of the hive: that the Bee which rules and gives life to the hive, is not a King, but a Queen, and a mother.’ The Mystery of The Hive’ by Eugene Evrard. The author is talking about Jan Swammerdam, 1637 – 1680. (From the collection in Hereford Library)

A card in a book

638.1

I began a year ago with a coincidental question to the librarian Anne-Marie in Hereford Library – which was if by any chance they happened to have anything more in their collection about beekeeping and Alfred Watkins (as I had previously seen one glass plated photograph of a bee demonstration van). A trip downstairs  to the windowless underbelly of the library revealed shelves of books all dated 638.1.