Public Realm Commission

This project, 063 Urban Songline (Another Hurling of the Silver Ball), was part of Tate St Ives’s ongoing commissioning of art in the public realm for and with its local communities. The programme offers a platform for artists to engage in residential, practice-led activity based in and around Tate St Ives, engaging with our context, our programmes, our community and our audiences. The 2019 commission was with Allard van Hoorn (b. Netherlands, based in New York), a sound, installation and performance artist who creates choreographies for architecture, urban structures as musical scores, scenographies for the built environment, and scripts for investigating our relationships to public spaces and nature. Van Hoorn took part in Tate St Ives’s artist residency programme in February and June 2019. The project was inspired by an ancient tradition known as the ‘Hurling of the Silver Ball’ which still takes place annually in February on Feast Day and where a small silver ball is chased through St Ives as part of the celebrations. Van Hoorn reimagined this silver ball at a much greater scale, collaborating with residents to create a unique procession that celebrated the communities of St Ives and their relationship to this heritage and the town. Van Hoorn initially met with members of the local community to research St Ives, its traditions, history, and people, with the goal of involving local people in the project’s development and final performance. Between the two residencies, the project was also supported by Tate St Ives staff in terms of ongoing community discussions. In June, van Hoorn met with groups and individuals and collaborated with them to shape their contributions to the final piece. This involved meetings and rehearsals with groups including the Ives Skate Park, St Ives Community Orchard, St Ives Scouts and Rainbows, religious leaders, Salvation Army Youth Club, Porthmeor Studios, St Ives RNLI station, St Ives Harbour Master, St Ives Sailing Club, Penbeagle residents, local fishermen and traditional Cornish ‘Guise’ musicians. Informal community drop-in sessions also took place at St Johns in the Fields Church Hall and St Ives Library. The performance itself, on Saturday 22 June, 2019 took place as a procession through St Ives. Locations included St Ives Community Orchard, St Ives Skate Park, Palemon Best Recreation Ground, Ayr Field, Barnoon Cemetery, St Ives Harbour, and culminated in the Loggia at Tate St Ives where van Hoorn performed a sound piece of recordings taken en route mixed with recordings made with the local community in his studio. These recordings were then made available as a sound work in the loggia, and a film of the performance was displayed in Gallery 10 at Tate St Ives alongside the silver ball from the event and the small silver ball used in the St Ives Feast Day hurling. Approximately 130 people within the community volunteered their time, skills and knowledge in the lead-up to the event and/or on the day of the performance. Six volunteers from Tate St Ives were involved in the performance on the day in different roles, as ball handlers, stewards and traffic marshals. Eleven members of Tate St Ives’s Community Advisory Group also acted as advocates for the project with two of them actively involved in shaping and being part of the performance. On the day around 3,000 people interacted with the performance and procession, 74 community players actively participated in the performance, and approximately 101 people in the local community were engaged in the process leading up to the day, some on multiple occasions for meetings and rehearsals in around 17 separate sessions. 55,684 people visited the exhibition documenting the event at Tate St Ives between July and September 2019, with a further 1,000 people listening to the sound piece in the Loggia (Gallery Entrance). Community groups reported a number of outcomes and impacts arising from the project that can be felt across the St Ives community: