Holy Hiatus

Just over a year ago, Ruth Jones created a public art event called Sleepers. Readers may remember or even starred in it as they dozed among ancient moss covered trees in Tycanal Wood above Newport. It was shown as a short film in exhibition at Oriel Myldan. Her interest in using the local people who had agreed to be part of that performance, was in recording the transformative action of what she called a 'communal dreamer' lying on the earth while dozing or sleeping in that naturally evocative and magical setting.

Her current work is a more ambitious project, scheduled for Cardigan in May '08. Far from a rural make-believe between nature and dream; Holy Hiatus will take place in the more urbanized peopled centres like the swimming pool and the newly built Small World Theatre; as well as the surroundings between the two bridges at either end of the town. This area by the river will be the ambit for a series of temporary public art events by local artists and from Ireland, Bristol and London. In the five newly commissioned performance works it will be these artists and their collaborators who become the animating active focus among ordinary people and visitors. Interacting with them as they go about their usual daily business, in shops and cafes, and around the town.

Ruth who lives near Fishguard, has an academic background, with a recent research fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts at the University of West England at Bristol to develop her landscaped orientated projects that deal directly with places and communities. Such as in the seemingly simple action of sleepers. Although the complexities involved in curating the range of public events and the number of speakers in the Symposium on the final Saturday (which is free to everyone who wishes to attend) means that it may turn out to become an elaborate interaction between the people of Cardigan and the artists she has chosen. In fact the closest in its formal outline to her earlier project will be that by Anne Lucus , from London. She intends to undertake a three-week residency here beforehand; in order to research the project, make contact with participants and collect film footage. Leading to the creation of a new video installation concerning the relationships between teenagers and animals in some of the rural communities of West Wales. This work will then be exhibited until the end of May at the Pendre Gallery in Cardigan.

There is a strong Bristol connection between Ruth Jones ; Dr. Iain Biggs the convenor of the LAND 2 project [for network members, academics and graduate faculty students] who is one of the speakers at the Symposium and the artist Yvonne Buchheim. Her work examines contemporary song culture in a visual art context. For Holy Hiatus, Yvonne will produce an audio-visual event at the Cardigan public swimming pool. It will use the gathered recordings of single notes performed by visitors to the pool and the leisure complex. During four days in May, the artist will be based here and would like to invite as many people who wish to be involved, regardless of singing ability or age, to create with her an original portrait of the town. The newly built Small World Theatre, will house the Symposium as well as a one-day indoor event by Maura Hazelden and Louise Laurens. Both artists through sound and movement will explore how repetition within a performance action can transform physical space. Creating and recreating an ambience that can be felt as other, as liminal, as sacred sp[l]ace by those who would enter into it. By working together to explore issues in the close proximity of bodies and voice, this unrehearsed durational performance may be a risk for the artists, as well as the audience. Hazelden, an artist based in Crymych, has worked in a number of different media including installation and performance. In her current investigation of the red riding wolf : girl to woman, to sexual being, to beast, to what with whom; she has been collaborating with Laurens who will be 'making a path by walking it' Her performance has two main themes. The effect of ritual on the physical space. And the trans-possession that occurs between the song and the singer. A repeated song builds up sound waves cumulatively with a growing sense of aural fullness for each new singing to float on invisible harmonies. So that at a particular and unpredictable moment, the song initially within the possession of the singer , will possess the singer to emerge into a new space, almost like a birthing. The sonic arts collective gwrando , founded by Lou Laurens and Jacob Whittaker , aims to provide a locus and a forum for its members by promoting events in Ceredigion and beyond.

Although liminal experience is often associated with uncertainty, disorder and risk, according to Ruth Jones it is also as understood to be potentially creative and transformative. The term derived from the Latin limen meaning threshold, was originally confined to anthropological sacred contexts; and then as a description within ritual space of 'a place that is not a place and a time that is not a time'. Since the 1960's the liminal has been cornered by artists to describe all and every ambigious art context; either in terms of unexplainable ideas or the more generalized experiences expressed by performance artists to and for an audience; as well as between individual notions of identity and place and community.
A large commissioned event called 'Drift' will be by Simon Whitehead with two female dancers, a poet and photographer; to eventually create an archive of image, sound and words surrounding the dancers and their exchanges with people. As a series of dance excursions, beginning at the Old Town Bridge over the Teifi and timed to the tides, the dancers will move through Cardigan, meandering past pedestrians and engaging with the architecture and the environment, almost as a kind of symbolic conduit for the tidal movement of the river through the town. The recent exhibition of small video works at Oriel Myldan and a detailed pedagogical publication 'Walking to Work' (2006) showed the extent of his pedestrian works, often at walking pace, performed in the UK, Europe and Canada. Whitehead who lives locally, was a founding member with Maura Hazelden and others artists, of the collective known as ointment. Their first group event at Parc y Pratt farm outside Cardigan town in February 2001; of performance, sound art , installations and video; was a seminal decision for the artists involved to move from previous gallery practices and concentrate their art within the rural environment of West Wales, where they lived and worked. The fact that this event coincided with the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease and the official curtailment of stock throughout the country, added a curious kind of propensity to that decision. During the past seven years they have continued with their commitment in terms of art practice and the rural. It would not be too much to claim that without this group here, the forthcoming gathering of artists and academics in Cardigan would have been a most unlikely event.
Holy Hiatus may sound like a cross between an exclamation and an exhortation. In fact the two words are so fraught with cross-cultural references it is worth deciphering some possible intonations and reflections. From Latin hiatum 'to gape' hiatus means a gap, an opening, a chasm, a break in continuity or a defect; and can express a grammatic concurrence of vowel sounds in two successive syllables. So as a definition sandwiched between the initial h, the middle t and final s; hiatus meaning a crossing can be grammaticaly defined in such words from the inclusion of double vowels. Prefaced by holy to generally mean religiously pure of heart, perfect in a moral sense or set apart for sacred use; to be said aloud with meaning it can be a wonderful encounter inside a mouth giving voice to the muscles we don't usually engage with in polite society.

Alastair MacLennan has been actively involved in performance art for many decades, in the UK and elsewhere. He could be described as the joker in the pack for the Belfast artist is fond of puns and oxymorans with his titles like the 'lure in rule' for his presence on the foot bridge over the Teifi from 5am to 5 pm on friday the 23rd of May. With his preference for old public places and museum galleries I wonder what's in store for the Cardi's who have to pass him by. Watching him last year for one hour out of his six hours in the National Museum of Wales during the Cardiff CAIT show, I would question Jones' assertion that his 'actuations' open up a space where the gap between the performer and the viewer is reduced. Rather the opposite from my experience with his face covered by a white cloth and surrounded by symbolic memorial flowers and black balloons. I came across a photograph of the event where I had been snapped, a tiny figure by a table, at the other end of the gallery from the hidden artist.

As Professor of Fine Art University of Ulster, he will be taking part in the Symposium to be held at the Small World Theatre. chaired by Dr. Heike Roms of the University of Aberystwyth. She has been conducting a series of regular public interviews with performance artists active in Wales. At the CAIT show it was Anthony Howell and more recently Simon Whitehead. Her database, 'What's Welsh for Performance? went on line late last year and covers a whole range of performance art, experimental theatre and dance, installation art, sonic art and poetry - www.performancewales.org. Two American professors with their particular area of studies in Sociology and Geography will be present. Dr. Bobby Alexander from the University of Texas, Dallas and the geographer Dr. Karen Till from the University of Minnesota who is co-director of Space & Place. As mentioned above, Dr. Iain Biggs, Reader in Fine Art, Bristol is convenor of the Land2 project. Dr. Sam Hurn is lecturer in Anthropology from the University of Lampeter; with Anna Lucas and Reuben Knutson, artist and arts organiser they will comprise a formidable team of speakers to explore many of the issues brought up by Holy Hiatus. Including questions that have been to the fore in relation to the Big Art Project since 2006 when Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was chosen to work on his art commission for Cardigan. During the past few months it has been particularly engaging in the letter columns of the Tivyside weekly newspaper.

From "Once or Twice Removed - My Dead Gallery" subtitled collected writings on art & performance. Unpublished, a Sharkey Chapbook. © John Sharkey 2008