Crab & Bee

Books and art by Phil Smith (Crabman) and Helen Billinghurst (Bee)

Crab & Bee is a collaboration between Helen Billinghurst, painter and walking artist, and Phil Smith, writer and performance maker. Our collaborative work reflects our shared interests in alternative cultures, ecology, folklore and walking in different landscapes. In 2019 our project ‘Plymouth Labyrinth’ – an extended walking and making project with different community groups and partners across Plymouth – culminated with an exhibition at the RAAY gallery, Stonehouse. We have given workshops in Cardiff, Huddersfield and Salford, presented papers at conferences including that of the Royal Geographical Society, and have performed a number of diagrammatical pieces at a variety of venues, from the Royal Conservatoire Scotland to the Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography. These have included ‘A Jubilee Scrying’ (2018), ‘Life and Death Walk’ (2019), ‘Nets, Webs & Carrier Bags’, ‘Boatburn Finale’ and ‘Around The Hills’ (all 2021), ‘Séance For Stonehouse’ and ‘Leadworking’ (both 2023), and ‘Patterns, Diagrams and Place Stories’ (2024). Triarchy Press published our essays and poems as ‘She Is The Sea’ (2019) and our book ‘The Pattern’ in 2020. We have made short films for The Box and UNFIX Festival (both 2021). We were co-organisers with Claire Hind of the ‘Walking’s New Movements’ conference at University of Plymouth in 2019, and with Claire were editors of ‘Walking Bodies’ (Triarchy Press) in 2020. Helen’s solo exhibition ‘Walking Diagrams’ was shown at the Roland Levinsky Building in 2019. Phil’s most recent publication is ‘Albion’s Eco-Eerie: TV and Movies of the Haunted Generations’ (Temporal Boundary Press, 2024).