(Bell Tower Feature begins at 4:10 minute mark in above video. )
Bell Tower
Obfuscating time through linework, Bell Tower shows how our present lives can be understood as an evolution of our past. Silhouetted figures depicting fourteenth century workers wrap around a three-dimensional structure, telling a story of class and culture that spans centuries.
Completed in 1991 and rising an astonishing three stories high, Bell Tower is adorned with twelve embroidered panels held up by an inner-skeletal form. Inspired by her time at the American Academy in Rome, Hemenway invites viewers of Bell Tower to reconsider their understanding of ‘strength’ in the architectural form as well as our knowledge of softness as it relates to fiber arts. While the structure houses enough rigidity to survive a coastal Maine breeze, the fiber-forward sculpture retains its want to let the fabrics dance.
Two pillars of Italian iconography shine through Bell Tower: architectural intrigue, and mastery of the graphic form. While Bell Tower is most easily read as an homage to classical construction, the embroidered depictions of the human form make clear the real namesake of Bell Tower: the sculptures which adorned Giotto’s Bell Tower in Florence.
Upon her discovery of the sculptures through photographs at the Hertziana Library in Rome, Hemenway was moved to create entirely new forms inspired by the original Italian sculptures. Through depictions of everyday actions of people who lived in the fourteenth century, Hemenway invites viewers to relate their own lives and movements to that of those who came before us.
