shewhomust: (durham)
shewhomust ([personal profile] shewhomust) wrote2024-09-15 12:31 pm
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Peace doves

After the Museum of the Moon, after a visit from Gaia, this summer Durham Cathedral has played host to a flock of Peace Doves.

Artist Peter Walker invited people - community groups and incividual volunteers - to write a message on a paper dove, then strung them together to make his installation. There's a lot about this process which arouses my prejudices: I've nothing against community involvement as an end in itself, but it's about the process not the outcome - I'm not more likely to admire the result because the artist has farmed the work out to other people. And I'm not against peace: who is? This is just a way of side-dtepping criticism, isn't it: but it's in a good cause...

You can't criticise art unless you've seen it, though. So in the last few days available, we caught the cathedral bus and went to have a look. And while I can't say I was moved by it, it was very pretty:

Purple star


The BBC report linked above mentions music: I did not hear any music. But I quite liked the effect of the mass of doves, and the way they were fromed by the cathedral. I thought, in fact, that, unlike those Luke Jerram globes, this was a piece which had been devised for this space, and it wasn't until I came to write this post that I discovered a description on the artirt's website of his Doves of Peace installation at Liverpool Cathedral.
anef: (Default)

[personal profile] anef 2024-09-27 05:36 pm (UTC)(link)
I would have liked to have seen this - and if it was this summer I probably could have. Poot!