echo

York St Mary's, York Museums Trust
June / October 2006

As a place of worship that has existed for nearly a millennium, St Mary’s contains memories and histories built up through dust and time. An archaeological and social history can be pieced together by sifting and extrapolating, but it can never be a complete story. More intangible, and equally significant things will also have taken place there. Untraceable sounds, experiences and emotions that science cannot pin down will have existed in the space. Nevertheless they have built themselves into the fabric of the building and it’s sense of place. A kind of ephemeral essence remains.

Echo is constructed from hairnets and the rosin-coated horsehair from used violin bows. Hairnets themselves are fragile, delicate containers, destined to eventually unravel, just like the human body. They are precarious, always on the verge of disintegration. Violin bow hair carries traces of its former use as an accomplice in the intense, sublime and emotive human experience of music making. When I first came across them, coiled up as the violinmaker discards them, they reminded me of little memorial wreaths or Victorian mementos.

Echo is a response to St Mary's as a kind of vessel for the traces of profound contemplation, sound, memory, history and human faith.

link to catalogue essay

link to York St. Mary's