Object, Walk, Phone developed from three days Dunhill and O’Brien spent examining an eleventh-century bell-casting pit at a former Cistercian abbey in Tuscania, Italy. The pit had originally been made by itinerant bell founders to cast the abbey bell and was later reused as a burial place for monks.
What interested them was the way the original hole connected a very physical act of making with something much less tangible: the sound of the bell travelling out across the surrounding landscape, marking time and extending the authority of the abbey beyond its walls.
The resulting work, shown in Just World Order at Artsway Gallery in 2008, took three forms. Object was a tailor-made lining formed directly inside the bell pit. Walk was a guidebook for a route based on the estimated distance the sound of the original bell might have travelled, transposed onto the landscape around the gallery. Phone was a mobile phone programmed with the sound of a medieval bell of comparable size and weight, recorded at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which rang intermittently throughout the exhibition.
Together, the three elements shifted between material, distance and sound: from the physical shape of the hole, to the territory a bell might reach, to the sudden intrusion of its sound into the gallery.
OBJECT, WALK, PHONE
