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Penelope Stewart is an artist, curator/writer and publisher whose multi-disciplinary practice encompasses expansive architectural installations/interventions, alternative photography, artist books, and works on paper. Re-current themes address notions of cultural memory, of time and space and a considered approach to the relationship between objects, architecture, gardens, landscape and the places between – places to intervene, inhabit and above all activate. Whether it has been historic sites such as Musée Barthète, a small museum in France, or a museum like the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY or the deconstruction/reconstruction of a 19 th century book of botany using cyanotype, her intentions are to create sensory spaces, haptic experiences, transforming our perceptions and possible readings of space, time and memory.

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La Grande Ruche – drawings (2010)

La Grande Ruche – drawings (2010)

acrylic on mitsumata tissue, 120″h x 120”w

La grande ruche reflects an ongoing exploration of the beehive metaphor in architecture, with connections between the ideological, political and artistic spin-offs of the beehive, ecology, and animal husbandry.

My current interest is in the work and ideas of utopian architects such as Gaudi, Olmstead, Le Corbusier, Walter Burley Griffin, Frank Lloyd Wright etc. It has been suggested that it was their observations of bees and beehives as a model or blueprint for utopian communities, and their use of natural forms, coupled with geometry, that rendered their work both intricate and alive. Specifically, Canberra, Australia designed by Burely Griffin and Le Corbusier’s “primitive hut” have inspired this investigation of beehive imagery.

La ruche is my contemplation of the hive as architectural model.

Selected Essays –Excerpts from a conversation & Miner for a Heart