Site specific exhibitions:
Venue 2 – Grimsby Minster – September 2013
1. Annabel McCourt’s contribution – water installations
My work for Vestiges is a direct response to the fact and folklore of the ‘lost villages of the sea’. Towns and villages have been (and will continue to be) lost to coastal erosion. My interventions in the Minster are two-fold:
Strategically placed ‘water’ starts to penetrate the highest point of the building and pours in directly over the Sacred Ministers’ Chairs, (the main one being reserved for the Bishop).
The second is a back-projection through the Hagioscope, or ‘squint’ to be viewed from the Lady Chapel. The Hagioscope is a relic of the former mediaeval chapel, allegedly affording a view of the High Altar for those forbidden entry to the Chancel. The angle of the viewpoint indicates the Minster changing over time. The altar is no longer directly in the line of sight. It has shifted. Therefore I allude to the intended alignment by including an echo of an altar in my projection.
“Over the centuries the church building has been redesigned, damaged and repaired, rebuilt, reordered and extended to meet the contemporary needs of the community it serves.” Minster Guide.
By ‘flooding’ the most sacred areas of the Minster I intend to question the role and fragility of the church in modern-day society.
Maybe the sea has come to reclaim the Minster’s oldest artefact – the Font podium consisting of fossilised sea urchins dating back some 250 million years!
2. David Power’s contribution – music played in the nave
My contribution comprises 9 pieces of electronic music of varying lengths played on CD. For each track, there is a silent shadow track next to it on the CD and the CD is then played at random during the installation meaning that there can be music separated by short or long silences. Although the tracks are largely different to each other, the use of reverberation to suggest the echo-y but large enclosed spaces of churches is common to all the tracks.
3. David Lancaster’s contribution – music played in the Lady Chapel
My work for Vestiges of Spirituality comprises a recording of some choral music (‘Fallen’, which I composed in 2009) now cut into short fragments and distributed over five CD players. Each entry of the choir is separated by silence and each of the CD recordings is a different duration so the appearance and possible combination of fragments cannot be predicted. The silences – sometimes quite lengthy – are an integral element of the music.
If you would like a more poetic image: many churches on the east coast have now vanished as a result of coastal erosion. Whilst some people claim to hear the church bells at low tide, I like to imagine the sound of their choirs, still singing, floating ashore on the wind.
4. Linda Ingham’s contribution – artworks and book in various parts of the Minster
As part of this group I am developing a body of work which contains several strands that refer to memory, place and the passing of time. H/ours are painted impressions of the sky, created in recognition of a shared ‘heaven’, although the imagery is taken from my own coastal environment. Heavier than Heaven is a modified biography of the musician, Kurt Cobain; 420 pages have been blanked out with ink, taking 40 minutes per page. This activity has been in the manner of a private performance, in mindfulness of emotional pain and the tragic outcomes which sometimes manifest as a result. Eulogy is an interactive project, where the audience are asked to contribute a happy memory of a loved one in the book provided. These will then go on to be hand-printed onto miniature scrolls which will ultimately make up an artwork containing the memories that will go forward into the future.
Vestiges of Spirituality 