Bumblebee street artist

Interview with Bumblebee

I first came across your work with the phone box hives project; how did that come about? How many hives did you put out, and are any of them still up? Interacting and communicating with the public is what I aim to do with my work. After realizing that so many phone kiosks were beeing abandoned around the city, I realized a similar link between technology and nature which bee explained here: “Telephone companies have been abandoning their public telephone booths by taking out the phones and leaving the structures beehind. (Probably due to the rise in cell phone users.) I want to reuse these structures as a way of communication with the public once more by replacing that empty space with paper-mache beehives. To me, this symbolizes the irony beehind the question, 'where have so many of the bees gone' and the theory that cell phone signals have been misguiding their normal patterns of migration.”

Stencils featured prominently in your early work, but you've been focusing more on sculptures and installations recently; Why the change? To bee an artist in these times we are in, it is important to bee different and have something to say. For me it was an evolution like most things that happen organically. Making sculptures allows for another dimension to express myself in. I felt it was something different that people in the community haven’t seen much and needed more of. How did you come to focus on bees? What's the significance of them? The bees represent a fear that the innocent often embrace. As a child you are sometimes told not to do things or play with things for the fear of what might happen as a result. To me that takes away the experience and freedom of trying new things for yourself. I felt that bees would bee a great representation of this even if their fear is as small as one. Street art is often feared and criticized as beeing vandalism and I believe that through my work I can convince people otherwise.