Last year, New Zealand-based artist Tiffany Singh, who you may remember from her rainbow ribbon installation at the 18th Biennale of Sydney, put out some other wonderfully interactive work.
For the Next Wave, a Melbourne-based art festival, she was commissioned to create Drums Between The Bells, an installation consisting of 12,000 bells hanging from white ribbons on one historic tree in downtown Melbourne.
“The title Drums Between The Bells alludes to the metaphysical realm of understanding in-between the physical and spiritual world,” she explains. “It seems an appropriate title for this work as the artwork transforms a living space into an open-air musical instrument. The tree will be densely filled with strings of small bells hanging vertically from the branches as a beautifully suspended aesthetically resolved installation; so the audience moving through the work would activate it along with the wind currents so that the work will became alive and able to be ‘played'.”
Cleo Barnett assisted Tiffany in producing this installation. Her role was to both document the event and to help with installing the actual artwork. Got to love how she describes her personal experience.
“This was my first time participating in an installation of this scale and wow…I had no clue just how much work was involved in the installation process and will honestly treasure this experience forever. Such a satisfying feeling to work so hard on something and then sit back (even if only briefly) and see the impact it had on literally tens of thousands of people. Everyone that passed seemed to flock to the tree in some sort of trance-like state, giving the feeling that the installation took on a magnetic force of its own. The look and sound of 12,000 bells all in one place was majestic, surreal and absolutely sacred.”
