Flight of the Bumblebees and works from the Life Support series, were presented by Ruup & Form as part of Platform 2022 at the London Art Fair, curated by Candida Stevens. Each year, Platform invites a selected group of galleries to present work by artists in response to a single curatorial theme. For 2022, the exhibition explored music and its relationship to contemporary visual art through works engaging with rhythm, movement, composition, and sensory experience.
Townsend’s response approached the theme through ecological observation and material atmosphere rather than direct musical representation. Taking its title from Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral composition, Flight of the Bumblebees emerged from the dense sound of pollinators moving through blossom trees within the artist’s local environment, connecting the visual abundance of spring blossom with growing awareness of pollinator decline and environmental fragility.
The exhibition marked an important transition within Townsend’s practice, bringing together translucent white wax sculptures, suspended paper surfaces, and partially dissolved botanical forms that moved away from hyperreal reconstruction toward a quieter and more unstable material language.
View Flight of the Bumblebees project →
