MORE HONEY

MORE HONEY (colouring)

With thanks to Lisa Kelly; the children of the Inner City Childe Care Centre, Ultimo; class CE2 (Grade 3) Lycee Condorcet/French School of Sydney; the Symons and Opats; Loose Projects family and friends...

during installation

Title card

More honey is a project developed by Spiros Panigirakis. The work includes a documentary by Louise Irving and Marian Patterson. This video provided a departure point for all other work in the project. This has been developed by Spiros with collaborators and participants listed below.

Monitor:
smoke, wax, wood, wheels, glass, honey 2007 (8.46 minutes)
Louise Irving and Marian Patterson
Louise and Marian would like to thank the Archibald family for their assistance in filming.

A4:
MORE HONEY (colouring) 2007
With thanks to Lisa Kelly and local community for ongoing involvement.

Postcard:
Oyster spiked with honey and almond dressing 2007
George Calombaris head chef The Press Club Restaurant and Bar, Melbourne

Business card:
Making bees dance 2007
Consultant: Joe Hill advertising creative at Singleton Ogivly & Mather
With Hieu Cat, Siobhan Murphy, Dominic Redfern, Dimitra Panigirakis, Sophie Panigirakis, Tony Panigirakis, Jonathan Symons and Jess Whyte

Display units: A-Flute/ E-flute cardboard
Spiros would like to thank Lisa Kelly for distributing and facilitating activity for MORE HONEY (colouring) with local Darling Harbour / Ultimo chid-care centres, Lauren Calleja from The Press Club Restaurant and Bar, Bianca Hester, Scott Mitchell, Sophie Panigirakis and Jonathan Symons for their support.

some preliminary documentation

(Photo credit: Lisa Kelly)

Spiking with honey

MORE HONEY (colouring)

Making bees dance

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

MORE HONEY… Louise Irving and Marian Patterson’s video work smoke, wax, wood, wheels, glass, honey (2007) provided the departure point and visual title for MORE HONEY. The extended cut of this documentary observed the daily work and struggle for shelf-space of the family run business Archibald’s Honey. I was unexpectedly moved by the impending (and predictable) loss of ‘consumer choice’ through this familiar brand’s supermarket delisting, even if I recognised a vague irony in my nostalgia for a corporate icon cruelled by corporate rationalisation. Perhaps I felt a parallel between independent artist-run spaces and independent grocers that are the last refuge of the ‘delisted’ product. (And where does that leave the farmers’ market?) It wasn’t so much that I wanted to develop a marketing campaign to rescue this vanquished brand, but that this moment of emotional engagement inspired me to explore the visual language of corporate communication and commodity culture. I wanted to go commercial. Could I collaborate with practitioners I admire from allied creative fields and balance critique, celebration and acquiescence to the commercial idiom in which they work? Honey – rich with associations of collectivity, social hierarchy, familial sociality, cross cultural links and comfort food – seemed the right symbol to guide my project into the cultural forms of public relations and visual merchandising. After all it’s the bees ‘lifestyle’ (if the word doesn’t evoke overly anthropomorphised ‘work-life-balance’ associations) that makes the honey. The exercises that form this project are: an emblematic colouring-in project activated with local children and facilitated by Lisa Kelly; a promotional collaboration with George Calombaris a chef with a background in molecular gastronomy; and you-tube viral-videos developed with Joe Hill an advertising creative to explore communication within family contexts. These tangentially work off Irving and Patterson’s video’s observations of industrious bees, incremental shifting of hives, transformative manufacturing processes and marketing that utilises stuffed bees and materials found in a few art practices…MORE HONEY