A UV gallery for bees, made from horse chestnut extract — with instructions to make your own.
Buzzworthy is a commissioned video work by Franklin Studios for Material Change, exploring material research, play and forms of perception that exist beyond the human.
Based in Vancouver, Franklin Studios is a research-driven design studio investigating materials and products in relation to the systems in which we exist. For Material Change, studio founder Marni developed a garden-based experiment around ultraviolet light, bees and the horse chestnut tree, bringing together material research with poetry, song and intergenerational play.
Bees perceive ultraviolet light, allowing them to see aspects of flowers that are invisible to humans. The garden becomes a site for thinking about this difference in perception. Flowers that appear colourful and attractive to us do not necessarily communicate in the same way to bees, whose visual world is shaped by ultraviolet patterns and wavelengths beyond human vision.
The work builds on Franklin Studios’ research into the horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum), a tree found both in Vancouver and Glasgow. Its bark, leaves and seeds contain aesculin, a naturally occurring compound that fluoresces blue under ultraviolet light. Marni developed a method for extracting aesculin from fallen or removed branches and experimented with incorporating the extract into different material forms, including paints and other UV-responsive materials.
For Buzzworthy, this research becomes a playful proposition: a gallery made for a species whose experience of the garden is fundamentally different from our own. The video follows the process of making the UV materials and creating the gallery, combining documentation with poetry and song. Developed intergenerationally with Marni’s nieces, the project treats experimentation and play as ways of learning rather than simply as methods for producing an outcome.
The work also asks what might become visible when we stop designing exclusively around human perception. The UV gallery cannot simply be understood on human terms. It points towards an environment containing signals, relationships and material properties that are constantly present but largely inaccessible to us.
This question sits at the centre of Franklin Studios’ wider approach to material research. Their work begins with curiosity and a willingness to follow unexpected properties, often asking what happens when a material is explored without a predetermined practical application. Here, the unusual fluorescence of the horse chestnut becomes a way of considering how different species encounter the same environment, and what might be learned by paying attention to those differences.
Within Material Change, Buzzworthy offers a different way of approaching material and ecological questions. Rather than beginning with a problem to be solved, the project begins with curiosity, play and an unusual material property. It asks what can emerge when we attend to the world through forms of perception that are not our own, and whether material research can create space for encounters with more-than-human environments that we might otherwise overlook.
The substance aesculin occurs naturally in the leaves, seeds, and bark of the horse chestnut tree (Aesculus Hippocastanum). When the aesculin molecule’s electrons absorb light of a certain wavelength, in this case ultraviolet, they are pushed into an “excited state,” which is a higher-energy arrangement than where the electrons are most stable, and they will give the extra energy up as visible light, or fluoresce. Acids have protons (H+ ions) that they release into solution when the pH gets high enough. Aesculin is an acid, and its electrons arrange themselves in a way that lets it fluoresce very brightly when it has given up a proton, but hardly at all when it has its proton (at low pH). So with the addition of a base to a solution containing aesculin will increase the pH, and in turn increase the fluorescence.
Egg tempera is a fast-drying, long-lasting paint has been used since early Egypt, gaining popularity in its use during the Renaissance. Yolk is composed of 51% water, 30.7% lipids and 16% proteins. In this UV-fluorescent paint, egg yolk acts as the binder, and the horse chestnut extract as a dilutant which controls the paint’s viscosity (resistance to flow). Egg tempera paints are viscoelastic, which are substances with dual properties of having a fluid’s viscosity and the elasticity of a gel or a solid. Studies have shown that the proteins of the egg yolk acted as a coating for the pigments, preventing long-term discoloration.
You can make your own UV paint from horsechesnut with this worksheet created by Franklin Studios.
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