Between-ness: Art and piety in religious heritage space

Abstract

This essay explores an exhibition series that was put on by HERILIGION UK in the redundant (closed) church of St Peter Hungate, Norwich as part of its research outputs. It describes the site and project-specific works of art that were commissioned by the UK team working with their heritage partners at Hungate. It suggests that each work intervened in the space, re-ordering it and offering visitors a new sense of place, that was, nevertheless, intimately bound up with building’s religious past. The essay concludes that contemporary art has the potential to mediate between religious and heritage, secular and sacred, past and present in ways that are sympathetic to that past but transformative. Indeed it proposes that the artists offered visitors access to a new sacred.