Visual Arts

The horn amplifies the sounds.

The ancient, 1500 acre woodland has been chosen as the ideal site for the award winning musical sculpture.

Conceptual artist Jem Finer's latest installation is Score For A Hole in the Ground, which Jem describes as a "hybrid water instrument". A large dew pond supplies running water to an underground pit, which houses steel discs and blades of different shapes, sizes and thicknesses. As the water from the pond, or rainwater, fall onto the steel instruments, sounds are formed. The horn acts as an amplifier, but visitors can also put bamboo poles to the surface of the pit and listen that way.

The piece was the first ever winner of the PRS Foundation New Music Award but is taking the art world by storm.

It was also the recipient of the Rouse Kent Public Art Award in May 2007,  and was described by chairman of the judging panel, Richard Cork, as “magical, mysterious and slightly surreal”.

Richard, a leading art critic and author presented the £10,000 prize money at an award dinner. The money will be divided between the commissioner and the artist and Stour Valley Arts will keep the Rouse chair for the next year.

Jem first found fame as a founder member of the Irish folk rock band The Pogues, with whom he played banjo and saxophone. After leaving the band in 1996 he turned his hand to art, usually with a musical theme. Jem was artist in residence at Oxford University's astrophysics department for two years, but his most famous work made headlines around the world on Millennium Eve.

That was the day he started Longplayer, a computer generated piece of music that will play constantly, without repetition, for one thousand years. The piece has been heard at the Trinity Buoy Lighthouse in Docklands, London for nearly seven years now, but according to Jem it is "movable" as technology and the building changes.

So who knows how or where it will end its epic run?

Score For Hole in The Ground probably won't last for 1000 years, however, as it needs the elements to make it work, and the chances are they will also eventually lead to its demise.

But its setting, a former hunting ground of King Henry VIII, possibly will.

The forest was chosen after Stour Valley Arts invited Jem for a visit. The organisation commissions artists to create works within the forest or inspired by the forest. Artists are encouraged to use the natural materials around them in their work, and most of the sculptures are designed to eventually decay and become part of the natural habitat once again.