Homemaking

Site-specific Sculpture
Guelph, 2015

Homemaking is a sculpture intended as a nesting site for solitary bees and wasps at the ReMediate installation.  I designed and made Homemaking in collaboration with woodworker and pollination activist Vicki Beard of Pollination Guelph, poet Anna Bowen, and in consultation with urban ecologist Scott MacIvor. It is a hand constructed wooden house filled with stems and wood blocks with tunnels for threatened solitary bees and wasps to lay their eggs inside. The text on the back of the house includes information about tunnel-nesting solitary bees and a poem by Anna Bowen, How to Love a Landfill.

I have always been fascinated by the houses and nests humans build for animals.  I find these gestures quaint, utopian and in some ways, absurd. And yet they provide a possible point of entry into thinking about and interacting with other species. Homemaking extends ReMediate's fumbling gesture to begin to know and care for this site and the species who make it their home.

Concept: Christina Kingsbury
Design: Christina Kingsbury and Vicki Beard
Woodworking: Vicki Beard, Mike Fortin, Jacques Fortin and Christina Kingsbury.     
Text: Anna Bowen and Christina Kingsbury

Homemaking was generously funded by the Guelph Community Foundation's Musagetes Fund, The City of Guelph through The Elevator Project and Pollination Guelph.

Photos: Christina Kingsbury and Scott McGovern