Dated: 03/03/2009
Press Release
January 09
Five Sisters
A new installation at York St Mary’s by Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings
23 May - November, 2009
The medieval Five Sisters window in York Minster is the inspiration for a thought provoking installation at York St Mary’s this Spring. Five Sisters didn’t always look like it does today. It would always have been striking - it is magnificent in size, and powerfully beautiful - but it has been repaired over the centuries, and each repair has brought subtle changes. What does the passage of time give to a work of art, with all the knowledge, labour and value judgments involved in its making and preservation? This is the question that the installation Five Sisters asks.
Created by mosaicist Emma Biggs and art critic and artist Matthew Collings, it will draw on the history locked in the 500,000 pieces of glass that make up the great 13th century window. They will use ten thousand medieval pottery sherds – small pieces of broken ceramic - from the collection of York Museums Trust - to assemble a huge mosaic, covering almost the entire floor space of the church.
Oil paintings, based on the same visual principles, will complement and echo the beautiful muted geometric appearance of the mosaic.
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.
More follows…
But you are also seeing the work of the archaeologists who unearthed these ceramic fragments, volunteers who cleaned them, the art gallery 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 by Biggs and Collings.
Five Sisters is the fifth installation to be commissioned at York St Mary’s, a decommissioned 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: 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.
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. The aim with our installation is 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