Reliquarys

14 Sep Reliquarys

Posted at 15:26h in Bibliography MA3, Home, MA 3 Resolution and Exhibition, Research, Sep '20 by
MA 2 supporting video for end of year submission

At the end of year 2 I was working on a box to house my practical work submission. The intention was to ship all the physical work made within the box. The ritual of opening and unpacking of the contents was to be a performative act in itself with my relational objects. Reliquaries are receptacles for the storage or display of sacred relics. Covid struck and we needed to submit digitally. Personally I struggled with translating this work, never born digital, into a video – so it went into the supporting documents folder. The smell of the inside of the box infused with the incense burnt in my studio, the tang of burnt wood from the pyrography, all lost in digital translation.

Reliquary Box c.1975 John Lessore born 1939 Presented by the artist 1994 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T06861

Boxes fascinate me. Miniature spaces to curate. A place to hide, so private, that can keep things safe. John Lessores 1974 Reliquary at the Tate features a painted castle in a landscape, the act of opening the box is intended to suggest the experience of going inside the castle. Activating imagination to expand time and space.

Notes on a sound reliquary

When the opportunity arose to engage sound in the Craobh Rua/TYB project I thought of housing the instruments inside a box. A Sound reliquary.

Concept design for the pattern on the Sound Reliquary

There are many well known historic relationships between art and music. Mussorgsky. Kandinsky. Wagner and Gesamtkunstwerk. Gesamtkunstwerk was an amalgamation of visual art, performance and music aspiring to be ‘a total work of art’. Musical notation, a rich visual record of heard or imagined musical sounds. Synesthesia, a visually descriptive musical language using colour. Lots of material to work with. I decided to use the score of Lullaby from Pan’s Labyrinth as my musical reference. In my concept sketch I chose vibrant painted colours to animate the surface and indulge my fondness for symbols as part of the design. I’ve found a selection of other artworks inspired by music and want to look more closely at their use of line/composition to describe movement. Plus a post of the box in progress to follow. The final piece will be user friendly and varnished to comply with Covid cleaning requirements.

References

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lessore-reliquary-box-t06861 [Accessed 3rd August 2020]

What’s in the box? The art of reliquaries
https://www.artstor.org/2019/03/04/whats-in-the-box-the-art-of-reliquaries/ [Accessed 28th August]

https://www.theartstory.org/definition/gesamtkunstwerk/