Hilbre Island, Wirral, UK. Friday 24th July 2020
Field Liturgy is a new performance-based investigation of time and place designed to formalise the relationship between contemporary art practice and landscape.
Many artists use field-based activity for research, inspiration and making. Freed from the physical constraints of the studio and contextual problems of the gallery, finds can be elevated to forms, the earth lends pigments for painting, the landscape itself becomes object – as well as subject (land art).
Much of this is serendipity and a walk can elicit a year of work. Its present importance is necessarily amplified by the current pandemic, but is arguably made more vital by our present eschatological crisis.
The argument therefore is for a more itinerant practice, and in nurturing a kind of trinitarian placemaking, opening-up future forms of assembly and creative production. A methodology that is more locus iste than genius loci perhaps.
In this spirit, I have devised a richly semiotic plan for creative collaboration called Field Liturgy. In its first conception the structure was explored with friends at Hilbre Island on the Dee Estuary. Future editions will be posted online here in due course.
Field Liturgy 1
24.07.20 19:30-20:30 (sunset 21:20)
Hilbre Island, UK (lat/long)
Music: The Dream of the Rood (2020) for shruti, recorder, singing bowl and voice. (MH)
Finds: Dunlin feather and oyster shell.
