C-PLATFORM × Amy Shelton

Project Description

Florilegium is a series of four artworks (Honey Flow I, II, III, IV), illuminating the melliferous (honey-yielding) floral sources vital for honeybees to sustain their colonies.

In Medieval Latin, a florilegium describes a collection of written extracts put together, like a bouquet. The word is formed from the Latin flos (flower) and legere (to gather) – literally ‘a gathering of flowers’. This quartet of light boxes has been created from Shelton’s meticulous gathering of hundreds of botanical samples collected and preserved, at the peak of their bloom, over an entire year.

The pressed samples, arranged chronologically in order of their flowering times, becomes a story map of sorts, tracing and capturing the fleeting and astonishingly subtle choreography of the plant-pollinator relationship month by month. Each panel reads as a slowed down metronome of each season, and together they track the natural cadence of the floral sources of forage essential specifically to honeybees from the first flourishing crescendo of early spring through to the summer months, ebbing towards the quieter overture of autumn and winter.

Related Information

Amy Shelton

– Artistic Director of Honeyscribe

– 2011, Associate Lecturer in 3D Design, Ceramics, University of Plymouth

– 1996–2002, Centre Director of the Arvon Foundation at Totleigh Barton, Devon, England, UK

– Masters degree in Fine Art, University of Plymouth

– History of Art, Manchester University