Glass Act

When the main features of a home are a furnace filled with 90 kilograms of molten glass bubbling in the garage and a master bedroom with glasswork on display where a bed should be, it raises a few eyebrows.

After all, who are the three 20-something guys coming and going from this house, and what are they up to? The answer is Phillip Bandura, Tim Belliveau and Ryan Marsh Fairweather, otherwise known as the Bee Kingdom, a contemporary glass-making collective that makes everything from vases to funky-looking sculptures.

The trio met at the Alberta College of Art + Design. Three years ago, they founded the Bee Kingdom. The Mount Pleasant house is their hive — there’s a hot-studio out back where they create colourful, conceptual works of art, and a gallery inside in which to display them.

“Glass is a seductive material to work with,” says Bandura. “The experience of blowing glass is captivating, and the results are beautiful.”

The slow ooze of liquid glass might seem romantic, but it’s not a medium for sissies. Creating anything more than an abstract lump takes technique, physical acumen and stamina.

The Bee Kingdom can knock out small pieces in less than 30 minutes, but elaborate sculptures clock in at up to six hours in the studio, with no breaks. It takes the combined training of all three artists to make a masterpiece — blowing air into the pipe to inflate the glass, adding colour and texture or fusing components together. There’s an intuitive choreography to the way they work, each one anticipating the other’s next move.

“It takes years to build up the coordination, muscle memory and confidence to the point where you can even begin to make something that resembles your idea or drawing,” says Marsh Fairweather.

Outside the studio, the Bee Kingdom’s group dynamic is focused and systematic, but far less fragile then the glass they work with.

“The politics of working in this kind of exchange is complicated,” Belliveau says. “One of our greatest successes is knowing how to collaborate fairly in a way that is sustainable.”

The collective functions as a single unit with room for individual creativity. Each year, they select one main theme, and each person works independently within that idea.

Their current project is centred on the concept of soft power, loosely based on the idea that a culture can use co-operation instead of coercion to attain what it wants. Bandura is approaching the theme with a political, satirical edge; Marsh Fairweather is taking his lead from mythology and Japanese cute culture; and Belliveau is exploring the interplay between nature and culture. The result is a single topic with three points of view, told in glass.

Soft Power will likely show late this year in Berlin. International exposure in places such as Greece has already launched the trio’s career to a global level, but the Bee Kingdom remains rooted in Calgary as leaders of a growing group of young glass artists.

“We want people to see art in ways they might not be used to and promote the idea that local art is something that is valuable and should be appreciated,” says Bandura.

To see more of the Bee Kingdom’s work, visit beekingdom.ca.