Memorial

Galleries, libraries, meeting places, colleges, schools, cloisters, religious buildings, entrances and throughways, council halls, commercial offices, shopping malls, city streets and squares. Churchyards, cemeteries, gardens and parks. Inside and outside. For a week, a month, three months, a season, a year. There are few limits to the possible locations and durations of a Memorial installation, or to the scale and number of pieces we could show.

With thanks to FaB, the contemporary arts festival that enlivens the heritage city of Bath every year (even during times of pandemic), Memorial is conducting a soft launch in shop windows in the urban centre. Other Bath locations are being discussed for the future, including a historic graveyard close to the River Avon.

For the initial unfolding of Memorial, in Bath from late May into July, 2021, the images and texts will be changing every ten days or so. We intend to adopt this approach wherever the installation is located in a busy public space.

St Mary’s Churchyard, in the Bathwick district of Bath, is a late Georgian gem. It brings together the tranquility and concentration of a sacred space with the evocative qualities of a Romantic ruin. This funerary chapel and burial ground was placed here when Bath was at its height as a celebrity resort. It became the final resting place for many of the rich and famous who had helped to make the city the most fashionable small  and elegant, urban centre in England. But, by the mid twentieth century, Bath had lost its unique status. The churchyard was crumbling and abandoned.  Fortunately, it was rescued from redevelopment, and is now a haven of reflection and retreat.

The perfect setting for Memorial.

We are in early discussions with the Chapter at Wells Cathedral to explore the possibility of installing Memorial in the magnificent Cloisters, and we are approaching the administrators at other outstanding venues. Yet we are also keen to locate our installations in unspectacular places, where the poems and images become absorbed in that most of vital of things, ordinary daily life. That's something we have all come to recognise in these extraordinary times.