The Temple of a Thousand Bells

11 May - 4 November 2012
York St Mary's.
Art Installation by Laura Belém.

Our installation for 2012 is composed of a thousand cast glass bells and a specially composed polyphonic sound piece, creating a 3-D effect to the sound of a narrated story.

The story is a free adaptation of an ancient legend about a temple of a thousand bells that was built on an island.

Over the centuries, the island sank into the ocean, and with it, the temple. As the story unfolds, it reveals the attempts of a sailor to hear the music of those bells.

Originally commissioned for the Liverpool Biennial International 10 exhibition and housed in the Oratory, the work is being reinterpreted and rehung for York St Mary's.

The glass bells have all been individually hand-blown and will hang with nylon strings in the nave of the former church. They do not have a clapper, creating a visual metaphor that matches the narrated legend, which tells about the lost music of the bells in the depths of the ocean.

The mass of clear, translucent glass bells evoke a visual quality of water and notions of spirituality and evanescence. They also convey a sense of fragility, lyricism, dream, imagination, a sense of presence and absence, and memory and displacement.

Laura's intention is to show a work that can touch the viewer's "inner score" – soul and heart – something we share in common universally and that transcends geographic and cultural boundaries.




St. Mary's Church, Castlegate, York YO1 9RN