Monique Martin's new public artwork displayed in Saskatoon trees

If you take stroll this winter along the river in downtown Saskatoon, you might notice more than squirrels in the trees.

You'll see a series of interlocked, clay hexagons hanging in 89 trees along the path from the Meewasin Centre to the Mendel Art Gallery. They're intended to invoke the shapes found in beehives.

"It's really about how we're all linked, all the way down to the little tiny bee," said Monique Martin, the Saskatoon artist behind the project. "Every decision we make affects people around us, and the world, and we need to understand that linkage to really respect all the things around us."

The installation is named, fittingly, We Are All Linked. It's part of the City of Saskatoon's Placemaker temporary public art program.

Martin said she designed the exhibit to be a multisensory experience.

"Some of [the hexagons] are are coated in beeswax ... you can hear it, because the clay hexagons will touch against each other in the wind, on a warm day you can smell the beeswax and of course you can see them in the trees."

Martin hit upon the idea of incorporating bees into her artwork after visiting a beekeeper.

"They opened up a beehive, and all bees were dead," Martin said. "I just started to think about how we change the environment so much that these things happen to animals and sometimes we're not even aware, but then we're also not aware that sometimes our decisions affect other people."