Holy Hiatus: Ritual and Community in Public Art

In May 2008, five temporary art events by artists Alastair MacLennan, Maura Hazelden, Simon Whitehead, Anna Lucas and Yvonne Buchheim, took place in public spaces in Cardigan exploring themes of ritual, community and place. Holy Hiatus sought to examine the ways that artists can draw audiences into different, often unexpected experiences of place through ritual. The temporary, mobile and in some cases, understated nature of the works meant that the impact was often subtle, but the artworks nonetheless created a ripple of effect for audiences, leading witnesses to wonder what they had just seen and to what extent had they knowingly, or unknowingly, participated in it? The book also offers a contextual framework for the project within a field of cultural theory that ranges from contemporary art to anthropology, sociology and religious studies

Ruth Jones Dr. Ruth Jones is an artist and curator based in West Wales. She has exhibited widely in the UK, and internationally in Ireland, Poland, USA, Spain and Quebec. She studied Fine Art at Liverpool John Moores University and The University of Ulster where she completed a Masters degree in 1997 and a practice led DPhil in 2002. In 2006 she was awarded an AHRC Fellowship in Creative and Performing Arts at the University of West England, Bristol exploring the relationships between ritual, place and community in lens based and public art. Recent projects include sleepers 2006, a film and public art project in conjunction with Oriel Mwldan, Cardigan; Vigil 2008, a video installation about Strumble Head lighthouse, and Cloddfa 2010, a video installation exploring the disused quarries at Porthgain, Pembrokeshire. Jones was a co-director of the Belfast based artist run gallery Catalyst Arts between 1997-99. She also co-curated the exhibition And the One Doesn't Stir without the Other for the Ormeau Baths Gallery in 2003 and edited the accompanying publication. She has published articles in a number of catalogues and journals, including 'Betwixt and Between' in no place I'm going to, 'Becoming-hysterical, becoming-animal, becoming-woman in The Horse Impressionists', in JVAP, 3:2 and 'Between a flashing star and a gravestone, sleepers, liminality and communal dreaming' in the AHRC funded website Imaginal Regions. www.ruthjonesart.co.uk Bobby Alexander Dr. Bobby C. Alexander is Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Policy and Political Economy in the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. Alexander received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in Religious Studies; he was awarded a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology by Union Theological Seminary. Dr. Alexander is the author of two book monographs - originally published by the American Academy of Religion and currently in the catalogue of Oxford University Press. His publications in the fields of Religious Studies, social-scientific study of religion, and ritual studies, examine religion and social change. Dr. Alexander is co-author and co-editor of a forthcoming book based on a grant project funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, which he served as Project Director. His current research focuses on performance of credibility in the legal process of political asylum, and the contribution of religion and ritual to change in gender roles for immigrant women. His research has been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, CrossCurrents: Association for Religion and Intellectual Life, Overbrook Foundation, and American Academy of Religion. Dr. Alexander serves on the Board of Directors of Yale University's Institute of Sacred Music. Samantha Hurn Dr. Samantha Hurn is lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Wales, Lampeter. She specializes in Anthrozoology or the comparative study of human interactions with non-human animals in a wide range of cultural contexts. Her research interests include the different ways in which humans and non-human animals perceive and engage with their environments and each other, and the various forms of indirect, inter-species communication which occur during these interactions with particular reference to farming, hunting and outdoor leisure pursuits (e.g. horse riding). She is also concerned with investigating the ways in which animals are selectively bred in response to specific environmental conditions, or human aesthetic ideals and functional expectations of how an animal should 'perform'. Dr. Hurn's current research focuses on cross-cultural human relationships with 'charismatic mega fauna', notably big cats, wolves and primates. She is considering the ways in which practical engagements with these animals, who are frequently 'problematic' in the eyes of the humans who have to share the same environments, has informed local cultural understandings and resulted in complex mythological representations. These mythologies have implications in terms of conservation, and Hurn is interested in investigating local ideas about predatory or transgressive species with a view to assisting conservation efforts. Iain Biggs Dr. Iain Biggs is Reader in Visual Art Practice in the Faculty of Creative Arts, University of the West of England, Bristol; Director of the Place, Location, Context and Environment Research Centre (PLaCe); and a co-convener of the national network LAND2. He acts as Director of Supervised Research for the Faculty of Creative Arts and is a specialist in arts practice-led research. Iain trained as a painter and printmaker at the University of Leeds and undertook an MA by thesis at the Royal College of Art, but describes his current practice as an ethnographically inflected variant of deep mappingA". Dr. Biggs is currently finishing the second of a three-part collaborative expanded bookwork project - Debatable Lands - which involves collaboration with other artists, a musician and academics from a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The project uses traditional Borders ballads as a starting point for animating a rich interdisciplinary 'conversation' around questions of identity, place, politics, belief and belonging. He is also currently the principal investigator for a collaborative interdisciplinary ESRC-funded arts-led project in rural north Cornwall that will 'deep map' the relationship between older people and their landscape/environment. Alastair MacLennan Alastair MacLennan is based in Belfast and was a critical figure in the development of experimental performative practices during the 1970's and 1980's in Northern Ireland. He was a founding member of the international research group ARE (Art, Research, Exchange) and he joined the European performance art group Black Market International in 1989. In 1985, he established a Masters course at the University of Ulster and between 1992 and 2008, he was Professor of Fine Art. Alastair has exhibited widely in Europe, North and South America and Asia and represented Ireland at the Venice Bienniale in 1997. The Ormeau Baths Gallery presented a major retrospective and publication Knot Naught in 2003. He has received numerous awards including the 'Lifetime Achievement Award' from Trace, Cardiff Art in Time in 2007. MacLennan's 'actuations' - which he describes as a direct realization of actuality - open up a space where the gap between the performer and the viewer is reduced or even annulled by drawing the audience into a different state through meditative and ritual activity that can be profoundly moving. www.vads.ac.uk/collections/maclennan Simon Whitehead Movement artist Simon Whitehead works from his base in rural West Wales. Originally trained as a geographer and dancer, over the last 15 years he has developed a body of work from pedestrian practices; made at walking pace his works are place-sensitive and involve a process of ritual reconstruction through the body, live performance, dance, sound and film. Whitehead was a recipient of a Creative Wales Award in 2005 from the Arts Council of Wales. He was visiting Artist at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park 2005-06, where he developed Walks to Illuminate, a series of nocturnal walks for the public. In 2009 he completed Scatter (pedestrian-borne seed) in central London, he made Run Like a Horse as part of a residency in Laboral, Spain and collaborated on the residency FIELDWORK with dance artist Jennifer Monson in New York City. Over the last 12 years he has collaborated closely with Melbourne-based sound artist Barnaby Oliver. They are currently working on a new project PINGS, exploring the geographical space between them through rivers, sound and performance. (www.untitledstates.net). Simon is a founder member of ointment, an itinerant artists collective and in 2006 he published an anthology of his work, Walking to Work. Maura Hazelden Maura Hazelden is a multi-disciplinary artist working from West Wales. Originally trained in dance, she has since studied surface pattern and illustration, multi-disciplinary computer application and fine art: performance and photovisual, Cardiff (UWIC). She also taught fashion & textiles contextual studies at West Wales School of the Arts. Maura has been part of the ointment collective of artists since their inception in 2001, creating performances and installations including at Forest Art Festival, Darmstadt with Simon Whitehead and residencies in West Wales and Quebec, Canada with Boreal Art/Nature. Her exhibitions/performances include showings in Cardiff at: g39, Tactile Bosch, Oriel Canfas, Cardiff Art in Time 1999 & 2007 as well as Aberystwyth Museum; Bandits Images: Festival of Audio Visual & Multimedia Art, France; Osnabruk Media Arts Festival, Germany; Oriel Mwldan and with Diversions Dance Company. The six hour Holy Hiatus performance, investigating repetition & prayer, with sonic artist Lou Laurens is building into a layered yearly event. Hazelden's work wanders through the domestic, memory and perception, the land; seeking the sensual; investigating the subliminal, the liminal. From order to evanescence: solid to vapour: experience to memory. The outcomes take various forms: performance/action/live art; photovisual and installation - sometimes all together. Currently she is moving into using writing within the fine art performance context. www.maurahazelden.blogspot.com Anna Lucas Anna Lucas makes moving image work that develops observations of social networks and specific institutions or spaces. The works often focus on the intersection between the manmade and natural environment. Frequently the films portray people who's specific knowledge and devotion to what they do provides them with faith in, or escape from the quotidian. Her recent major commission Little White Feather and the Hunter is a single screen video and accompanying book loosely re-telling the story of Native American Princess Pocahontas, touring in UK and USA. Her films collectively named Here and Your Here, shown at FACT, Liverpool 2007 and Konstcentrum, Gavle, Sweden 2009 are based on complex themes connected to unusual plants found in Brixton markets, South London, Peru and the Middle East. 16mm films Seventh Heaven 2006 and Begail Foxwell Whip 2008 explore the diverse experience of teenagers at school in East London and working with animals in rural Wales respectively. Her latest 16mm film Demonstration 50.15 and a series of 'blind movie' drawings come from a period of research in the Anatomy lab whilst on a Wellcome Trust Fellowship at Dept of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing at Oxford University. Yvonne Buchheim Yvonne Buchheim was born in Weimar and lives in Bristol where she is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England. Her ongoing Song Archive Project functions as a framework to question cultural belief values and playfully suggests complex identities through song. Her art practice explores contemporary song culture in a variety of media, ranging from video to site-specific installation, performance and live art. Buchheim has been awarded artist residencies and commissions in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, USA and Iran. Recent solo exhibitions include the Cheekwood Museum of the Art, Nashville, USA 2008; Butler Gallery, Ireland 2007 and Oriel Davies Gallery, Wales 2007. Recent group exhibitions include the Wallace Gallery, New York, USA; North+South commissions at the Southampton City Art Gallery 2007 and EV+A, Limerick 2006. She was awarded the Good Ideas Award from SAFLE, Wales 2007, resulting in two works for Holy Hiatus: a public performance Sound Water Beat 2008 and an underwater sound installation Earworms 2009 both at the Cardigan Swimming Pool in west Wales. www.song-archive.org