Inventing rituals; inhabiting places ritual and community in public art

Abstract

In May 2008, five temporary art events were commissioned by Ruth Jones in public spaces in Cardigan (Wales) as part of the project Holy Hiatus. The project explored the possibilities for ritual to be employed creatively in public art practice, and to examine the ways that artists can draw audiences into unexpected and potentially liminal experiences of place through ritual. Some people locally and from further a field knew about the events through publicity material or word of mouth, and made an active decision to attend, while others came across interventions unexpectedly whilst going about their daily business: for example, Alastair MacLennan was working on the footbridge over the River Teifi for twelve hours, tying ribbon, greenery and paper boats to the railings and talking to curious users of the bridge; while Simon Whitehead worked with dancers Kate Willis and Andrea Buckley to create an improvised dance Drift (which followed the flow of the tides) through the town over three days. A few people living in and around Cardigan became collaborators through their involvement in the artists' projects; Yvonne Buchheim created a public performance at Cardigan swimming pool in collaboration with two local swimmers and two singers and Anna Lucas spent three weeks meeting teenagers in West Wales who were actively involved with working animals, in order to gather film footage for a new video installation that was exhibited in the Pendre Art Gallery. Maura Hazelden collaborated with acoustic singer Lou Laurens and created a six-hour performance in the newly built Small World Theatre: a company deeply engaged with local communities. The temporary, mobile and in some cases, understated nature of the works meant that the impact was often subtle, but the artworks nonetheless created a ripple of effect for both active and incidental audiences, leading witnesses to wonder what they had just seen and to what extent they had knowingly, or unknowingly, participated. Following the completion of the projects, a series of interviews with twelve audience members were carried out by researcher Sarah Pace from Safle (an independent public art consultancy based in Cardiff) in order to gain an insight into how the artworks were received. This article integrates the findings from these with theoretical understandings of ritual from fields such as anthropology, sociology, cultural and communication theory. The article begins by laying out the arguments for and against the creative potential of ritual. The interviewees' experiences of the artworks for Holy Hiatus are then compared to find support for the proposition that experiences of liminality are possible in public art projects that employ ritual. Finally, the article looks at how experiencing public rituals in places that are familiar to us might alter our perception of those places in both exciting and challenging ways. The names of the interviewees have been altered to maintain anonymity.