Holy Hiatus: ritual and community in public art
Editor: Ruth Jones
Publisher: Parthian
Price: £12.50

Full Colour 144 pages

In May 2008. five temporary art events by artists Alastair MacLennan, Maura Hazelden, Simon Whitehead, Anna Lucas and Yvonne Buchheim took place in Cardigan, west Wales, exploring themes of ritual, community and place. Holy Hiatus sought to examine the ways that artists can draw audiences into different, often unexpected experiences of place through ritual. The temporary, mobile and in some cases understated nature of the works meant that the impact was often subtle, but the artworks nonetheless created a ripple of effect for audiences, leading witnesses to wonder what they had just seen and to what extenet they had knowingly or unknowingly participated in it.

Holy Hiatus could be seen as an experiment in ‘performative interaction’ and this publication aims to extend this dislogue beyond the actual artworks, which have left no physical trace, but exist in people’s memories and asdocumentation in the form of images and sound, and in recorded audience responses to the works. the book also offers a contextual framework for the project within a field of cultural theory that ranges from contemporary art to anthropology, sociology and religious studies.

Featuring contributions from:
Ruth Jones, Alastair MacLennan, John Sharkey, Maria Kerin, Samantha Hurn, Simon Whitehead, Bobby C. Alexander, Iain Biggs, Anna Lucas, Zoe Skoulding, Yvonne Buchheim, Maura Hazelden, Elizabeth Mahoney

Launch
The publication was officially launched in September 2010 at the Holy Hiatus Symposium