Vetch Veg

Owen Griffiths seen here

Swansea has seen a marvelous art project develop on part of the old Vetch site of Swansea City Football Club over the last nine months. Owen Griffiths has been the inspiration and the engine behind creating and populating a community vegetable garden on the site with the enthusiastic participation of local residents and groups. Glynn Vivian Gallery is holding an off-site event, the Sandfields Festival of Ideas on the site this weekend with a lovely programme of events including performance from Peter Finnemore, food from the Bangladeshi Community who have a plot at the garden, music from Joan Joans, Sarah Passmore and the Swansea Ukelele Orchestra, yoga with Glynn Vivian Gallery's Karen MacKinnon and much more...

Vetch Veg is a socially engaged art project commissioned as part of the Cultural  Olympiad, you can read all about the project on the Vetch Veg site.

For the Bees: a song of will for the honey bee

I went to Swansea University last evening to attend the first public performance of For The Bees, an art project by Owen Griffiths and Fern Thomas. To highlight the plight of the vanishing honey bee, Owen and Fern have commissioned a piece of choral music to sing to two hives of honey bees that have been installed in the grounds of the university. The choir has been brought together from interested people (mostly amateur singers) and last night they gathered with an audience of around thirty folk, to perform the piece, composed in collaboration with Swansea's Mial Watkins.

Owen spoke to the BBC about the performance: "The idea is that this coming together to sing to the bees really is a poetic gesture to the bees, to reconnect and engage people, to see that the bees are in trouble...It's going to have a very haunting quality to it - it's like a lament to the bees." seen here

The idea behind the work is to experiment with the effect the singing and the positive intentions of the participants may have on the well being of the bees, and at the same time raise awareness of the issue.

There was also a gold painted caravan which serves as a mobile cinema at the site (nick-named 'Penny') where you could watch a film to learn about the crisis that has initiated the project.

It is a lovely project, the piece was very short, only about three minutes, but it was very beautiful, hope the bees enjoyed it...