- Venue
- RADAR
- Location
Anti-Bell is project led by Loughborough based arts organisation Radar, who commission new work on the university campus and surrounding town. The project is part of a wider programme that uses research undertaken by Loughborough university professor Marek Korczynski into the social history of music in the workplace. Using Korczynski’ s research as a starting point, Radar invited London based artist Ruth Ewan to respond to Korczynski’s research through a new commissioned work. Ewan’s practice references anecdotes from both recent and distant social history, interested in viewing history not as a remote past but as alive and potentially relevant to the present, so its no surprise that Ewan draws on Loughborough’s history as a site for bell production, and the significance of the bell as an instrument of social and political control.
Ruth Ewan’s project consists of various outputs in addition to the live event at the bell foundry including an artist talk, and a small publication which brings together archival images and texts that provide some context to Ewans interests in the bell’s wider social and historical positioning. Ruth Ewan has chosen an old bell which has been smashed and melted down in a furnace, of which the resulting mass will become an anti-bell, an act that reverses the traditional bell making method that has existed since the 14th century.
The majority of the event was made up of a tour of the foundry by former master bell tuner Stephen Fletcher. The group is swiftly led past the furnace melting Ewan’s smashed bell, and it soon it becomes clear that the foundry and its history buried under the decades of black soot, is somewhat more appealing and engaging to its attendees and Fletcher than Ewan’s anti-bell act. Listening to the tour and the foundries workers, the building presents a strong visual comparison to the mining industry in the 1950s. An environment alien to most, yet a proud profession to its workers. Interestingly Fletcher has recently fallen to the foundries changing times and made redundant. Yet still returns to give tours to members of the public.
Thought to be the oldest surviving manufacturing industry in the UK, the Loughborough Bell foundry established it current setting in 1839, and since has been a key manufacturer and employer in the town. The biggest bell cast at the foundry was ‘Great Paul’ for St Paul’s cathedral, weighing in at 17 tons (this is somewhat small in comparison to the worlds proclaimed biggest bell the Tsar Bell III in Moscow which weighs in at 180 tons) and the foundries most arguably iconic bell being AC/DC’s Hell’s Bell which plays on the open track of their best selling album Back in Black.
The tour ends with what most had come to see, Ewan’s melted bell being poured into a sand pit, by the foundries workers. The short climax see’s a molten metal substance produce an intensive white light as it spits and flames before settling into a harden mass. The hardened metal mass will later be displayed in a gallery environment as documentation of this the act and this project, further removing it from its historical context.
More interesting than the melting of the bell, was observing the foundries workers participation in the activity. You can’t help but feel a twinge of pity towards the bell makers, and their seemingly apparent lack of understanding of the wider context in the melting of the bell. We stand around the hardened mass of metal, an object once with a loaded past and historical importance transformed into a functionless solid with little use, that acts as a visually poignant symbol of the direction the foundry is slowly heading.
We mill through the foundry’s humble museum as we head out the door, and return to the present day.
