Creating a buzz in the City

The Pollination Project, in association with Urban Buzz, a campaign for bee-friendly cities, is a multidisciplinary project with an ecological focus which hopes to inspire staff and students to engage creatively with the beautiful city-centre campus environment through art, music and writing.

The innovative project at York St John will encourage the notion of ‘pollination’ between disciplines and media. The work of creative writing students will be passed on to music students to inspire their compositions, which in turn will be passed to fine art students to inspire their pieces of work. Students will plant wildflowers and take part in an outdoor writing, composing and sketching workshop as initial inspiration for the project. The culmination of the project will be a ‘Bee Hotel’ designed by fine art students - a structure to be installed in the wildflower area of the award-winning ‘Yorkshire in Bloom’ campus to encourage lone pollinator bees into the space.

A symposium hosted at the University on 14 March will bring together award-winning artists Wolfgang Buttress, who created The Hive exhibit at Kew Gardens, Amy Shelton, whose beautiful artwork Florilegium is owned by the Wellcome Trust, poet John Burnside, and pollinator-expert and illustrator Steven Falk, as well as Andrew Cutts from Urban Buzz.

Urban Buzz is a national campaign which aims to encourage bees into urban spaces and save their species. York has been chosen as one of eight ‘Buzzing Cities’ for pollinators, transforming mown and unused urban sites into 200 hectares of rich and vibrant habitat for pollinating insects.

The Symposium is open to all and will be followed the next day by a Wildflower Workshop day of planting, writing and sketching. Both are pre York Literature Festival events and can be booked at via the York St John website.