Client: Cook Museum of Natural Science

Overview

This commisioned fifteen by ten foot glass, metal and fiber optic chandelier is representative of bees swarming as they leave their hive in springtime. 25,000+ beads, hundreds of feet of fiberglass strips, 30,000+ inches of wire, scores of blackberry bush branches, a football field length of both stainless steel tubing and fiber optics. This is just the beginning of the list of materials for this mixed media piece.

Goals

With the design of the new, larger Cook Museum of Natural Science, the desire was to incorporate a local artist to immediately captivate the museum attendees as they entered the lobby of this grander science museum. The theme of the piece, a bee swarm, reflected this notion that like bees which swarm once they are too big for the hive, the new museum was expanding to its new space. They wanted a piece that reflected this idea in a way that was reflected the natural sciences of the museum's collection and educational purposes.