3 Feet or 3 Miles & Keeper

3 Feet or 3 Miles & Keeper are a collection of projects that made up part of my graduate work during my time at Dun Laoghaire Institute Of Art Design + Technology. Both Projects focus on my farther a bee keeper. Keeper captures how he makes honey and maintains his bees, while 3 Feet or 3 Miles, captures a destructive time of when the area he kept his bees was destroyed and forced him to move his hives.

Keeper

This project and book encapsulates the work of my dad as a humble beekeeper. The process of making honey starts with the building of the hive. Then over the year the keeper maintains the hive and looks after the bee colony. All of the work the keeper carries out leads to the final product; pure raw honey, which he puts into jars, ready to be enjoyed.

3 Feet or 3 Miles

You can only move a beehive “3 feet or 3 miles”

This project documents the destruction of a small utopia, near my family home, in which we kept, chickens, ducks, and most importantly, my dad kept his beehives. The images in this project depict the landscape after the trees have been felled, the vegetation cleared and a new chain link fence has been constructed.

The destruction of this landscape to make way for the building of new houses has destroyed not only our space, but also the trees in which birds lived, and the wide variety of native plants that grew on the land. The silence is now deafening, and the land is scarred beyond recognition.

The photographs in the project depict the destruction of this area, which is a fundamental element of the rapid changes to the landscape and area that I called home.

The bee collects honey from flowers in such a way as to do the least damage or destruction to them, and she leaves them whole, undamaged and fresh, just as she found them.

- Saint Francis de Sales