Pollinator Concentrator
Youth STEAM education: The original intuitive seed that birthed the vision of this installation came from the primary urge to have young minds transformed by embodied experience with the animal world, and thus desire to conserve it. , Click to Enlarge
At the original offering of this project, I envisioned an aspect of the artwork that would immerse the young minds I was to teach,….and others young visitors to the artwork….in the fascination of learning identification of pollinator species. My feeling was identification leads to appreciation and thus conservation. It was understood that the youth in the workshop I was to teach would have some hands-on involvement in the creation of my artwork. Thus, early on I saw tiles having physical information of differing species, with youth learning the steps to physically produce those tiles, as an encountering of the morphological data of the animals. The parabolic resides deeply in the history of my work due to its optical significance. All unfolded from there. Having already taught many workshops in biomimicry, under the STEAM umbrella, I understood integrating biomimicry into the connection with pollinators would focus the young minds on additional reasons to conserve our biodiversity and yet as well give them a positive and sustainable outlook on what could/ and is unfolding in our world. The student’s final group projects, as seen via their drawings, showed that with the complexity of all the aspects covered in their workshop, they did absorb much of the teachings. The assignments for their final projects integrated the issues causing pollinator decline, and instilled creative thinking solutions.