MORE HONEY: some preliminary documentation

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

MORE HONEY

some preliminary documentation

MORE HONEY

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