Bee Springwood is an artist living in Norfolk since 1974, who bonded immediately with the wide open marshes and the long curve of the coastline. Attending Gt Yarmouth Art College, and learning to ride a bike, were both gifts to seeing and embracing landscape in a new and intimate way.
Having previously completed Cultural and Community Studies /English degree at Sussex university, Bee Springwood went on to do Fine Art at Coventry ( Lanchester Poly). There she was involved in feminist and eco-activist work. She followed this by studying Postgraduate Art Therapy at St Albans.
Art psychotherapy
Bee Springwood spent 36 years as an Arts Psychotherapist and educator, still pursuing her own art practice. She organised group shows, sculpture trails and collaborated with others. Pomegranate Artists have been her local group for the last 25 years. This practice has always brought home the level of eco-distress and disconnection, the underlying disease in society.
“Increasingly I realise that my focus for making is really a spiritual calling; to sing up the beauty, preciousness, vulnerability, and vitality of the natural world and help re establish our proper inter-relationship within it.”
Darning the gaps
Bee Springwood’s forms vary between sculpture, installation and performance, and personal ceremony. There are smaller works and journals with photography and drawing in its broadest sense,. She also engages with collage, and textile; using discards, recycled and natural materials. Her work intends to be “darning the gaps” we have created between human and other worlds.
Valuing hand craft skill and “women’s work”
Revisiting her final BA show work of 1977/8 about encounters with the coastline, seems very pertinent in these days of rapid sea rise and erosion, “For me it has been a way of developing a retrospective “taking stock.”
Bee Springwood is also keen to re learn traditional or renewed methods of working with plant and wood, dyeing and wild weaving. Collaboration and exchange with other artists and makers has been most welcome here, filling the gap in valuing both hand craft skill and “ women’s work” in her era of art education.
