Five Sisters
04/02/2009
Issued by: York Museums Trust
More than six thousand shards of medieval pottery will be used to create a new thought provoking installation at York St Mary's this May.
Mosaicist Emma Biggs and artist and art critic Matthew Collings will intricately arrange the fragmented pieces to create a mosaic that will almost fill the entire floor space of the church. Oil paintings will echo its beautiful, shimmering, geometric appearance.
Entitled Five Sisters, the installation will draw inspiration from the church and the history locked within the 500,000 pieces of glass that make up the great 13th century Five Sister window at York Minster.
The innovative concept, which will see the pottery returned to its original state at the end of the installation, is believed to be the first of its kind.
In a joint statement, the artists said: "This installation is a way of looking at history. It is impossible for any work of art to express an idea free from a visual tradition, free from the ideology of the past, and the labour of others. Artists are never the sole creators of their work, and Five Sisters asks you to look at the work of the hands that threw the pots, adhered the handles, applied the glaze and stacked the kiln.
"But you are also seeing the work of the archaeologists who unearthed these ceramic fragments, volunteers who cleaned them, the Trust that housed them and the taxpayers who funded their preservation. This work is an accumulation of labour, values, aesthetics, skills and knowledge from the past, remade and re-examined."
The thousands of pieces of broken pot have come from archaeological digs in Yorkshire and are cared for by the York Museums Trust. They are roughly the same age at the Five Sisters window in the Minster. A team of volunteers from the city have cleaned the varied pieces that will make up the intricate and abstract mosaic.
Five Sisters is the fifth installation to be commissioned at York St Mary's, a deconsecrated medieval church in the heart of York. The installations are created to complement the unique space and draw on its atmospheric surroundings.
York St Mary's is open 10am-4pm and free to all.
For more information on the church, Five Sisters and past installations go to: http://www.yorkstmarys.org.uk/
ENDS
Notes:
The Five Sisters window
Found in the North Transept of the Minster, the Five Sisters Window contains the largest amount of Early English 'grisaille' glass in a single window, anywhere in the world. The window was completed in 1260. It consists of five lancets, each of which is fifty feet high and five feet wide, and contains more than 100,000 pieces of glass.
The Artists' quote
Gleaming with a thousand variations of transparency, like mother of pearl, the Five Sisters window is rigorously ordered, but also free, asymmetrical and unpredictable. The window has an anachronistic modernism - this visual appeal comes partly from a quality of restraint it must always have possessed, but also from a reinterpretation given by its careful preservation and repair.
Compared to other windows in the Minster it is noticeably muted. Individual panes of glass are dissimilar in tone and colour. A pane of glass breaks and someone carefully puts another in its place; centuries of being remade seems to have given Five Sisters a greater visual weight than something conceived from a single unitary viewpoint. Biggs and Collings' Five Sisters aims to reorder fragments of historical material in a similarly striking way.
Further information
For interviews with the artists please contact Lee Clark, media coordinator, on 01904 687673 or email lee.clark@ymt.org.uk