Andy Klunder: Images I

'Our Father Which Art'

Our Father Which Art consists of seven turned beech 'fragments', which together constitute the entire text of the Lord's Prayer, and was originally made for an exhibition at St. Michaels Church in Honiton, Devon in the UK. The idea grew from a chance reading of an account of Guglielmo Marconi's experiments with sound. In his later years Marconi, who is credited with the invention of radio (and conducted some of his early experiment into that medium from Haldon Hill in Devon) came to believe that all sounds did not attenuate and die (as they actually do) but, on the contrary, perpetually reverberated in the Earth's outer atmosphere, or 'ether'. Consequently he tried to capture and record these sounds, most notably Christ's Sermon on the Mount, of which the Lord's Prayer forms a part. This futile endeavour seemed to me a work of art in its own right, and as the most ubiquitous and often uttered Christian prayer, the Lord's Prayer seemed an appropriate text on which to base a piece of work situated in a church, where countless worshippers over the hundreds of years of its existence would have lent their voices to the collective call to God. 1 2 The work was made by recording the spoken prayer as a visual wave-form (1), which was then rendered as a three-dimensional representation by means of a computer programme (2). This drawing was then enlarged and used as the pattern to lathe-turn beech-wood blocks into the final forms. It was fitting that the objects were made on a traditional carpenter's tool, and not inappropriate that they resembled the more elaborate forms of Buddhist prayer wheel, which believers spin in order to cast their prayers onto the wind to be carried away.