A Crossing Bell

"A Crossing Bell" was an installation commissioned as part of the inaugural edition of Estuary Festival, a biennial large-scale curated public art event. The broad curatorial agenda invited reconsideration of social and cultural contexts through which we navigate waterways such as the Thames.

The interpretation text located next to "A Crossing Bell" gives some sense of its intended scope: "Installed near the Tilbury ferry within a custom-built wooden shelter that offers views over the wide river, the engraved bell is there to be rung by passengers and festival-goers as they offer their prayers for a crossing (their own or someone else’s, a friend’s or a stranger’s, a crossing here at the Thames or one that lies further afield). The aspiration is that the bell transform the short journey on the openness of the swift-flowing river and suggest other crossings, other times and other places; its un-amplified peals finding their place amongst engine noise, the cries of white feathered gulls, voices and the soundings of the Thames itself".

An important personal motivation for the creation of the original work was to respond - in however oblique a fashion - to my sense of horror invoked by news stories accounting for the drowning of migrants on their journeys to Europe's shores. "A Crossing Bell" also connected to the long history of bells as sonic signifier's of warning and celebration in sacred and secular settings.

The bell was specially cast for me by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, at that time, Europe's longest continually operating foundry.

When the bell was subsequently commissioned for the "What Has To Be Done" exhibition at the Today Art Museum Beijing, the structure was reconfigured from its original connections to Essex coastal architecture (the bell tower re-used planks sourced from Southend Pier) to echo the red painted wood, columns and crossbars I remembered from the Lama / Yonge Temple. Equally, the new structure might be seen less in context of migrants on the passage to Europe and more in terms of those wider contexts - thus potentially in dialogue with what Don Ihde spoke of in "Listening and the Voice": "Ancient Chinese acoustics long ago recognised that there was sound beyond human hearing. Touching bells when sound had disappeared still yielded tactile perception of vibrations".

"A Crossing Bell" was mentioned in the Independent newspaper, the Thurrock Gazette, Artists' Newsletter and on BBC Radio 6 and had an article dedicated to it in the Southend Echo.

• http://www.metalculture.com/projects/est...
• http://chriswainwright.com/2017/01/21/wh...
• http://www.todayartmuseum.com/enexhdetai...