Pasture paintings and pollen hotels will be popping up this weekend in Auckland parks as part of the Pop event this weekend and early May.

What’s popping up, you might ask? Pasture paintings are forms that occupy verges on the edges of parks to act as ‘pollen hotels’ for beehives.

The inaugural Pop is a creative series formed by Alt Group as part of an artists’ collective and features The Park, by Auckland artists Taarati Taiaroa and Sarah Smuts-Kennedy; and the duo’s other project Pasture Paintings.

Public workshops will let people know how to create a pollen hotel at home and the can map their ‘hotel’ online on a site that visualises the path of bees travelling between beehives around central Auckland.

Pasture Paintings, with artist Richard Orjis, will see the creation of the pollen artworks.

The inaugural Pop concepts focus on urban ecology. One Pop project, The Roots: Pollinate, sees creative entrepreneurs’ movement The Roots working with year 12 and 13 students 20 ‘hotels’ for bees to collect and process pollen.