Pontefract Giants, Pontefract Castle 25 September 2021. Photograph: Max Hunter
Pontefract Giants
25–26 September 2021
Film-sound installation
Commissioned by Wakefield Council and Arts & Heritage
As night fell on the weekend of the Autumn Equinox 2021, the trees on top of Pontefract Castle transformed into ancestral giants, in an epic audiovisual art installation in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, that told a 300,000 yearlong story of the entangled relationship between humanity and nature. Artists James Bulley & Matthew Rosier working with poet Daisy Lafarge, actor Annabel Scholey and residents of Pontefract, West Yorkshire restored and reimagined a lost pagan celebration – the Dancing Giants of Pontefract.
And there was dancing of Giantes; and musick prepared to meet us.
Ben Jonson, 1618
In 1618 the playwright Ben Johnson happened upon the long forgotten traditional dance of the wicker giants of Pontefract whilst traversing England and visiting the town. Over 400 years later, and since the near-eradication of English pagan celebrations, Wakefield Council and Arts & Heritage commissioned artists James Bulley and Matthew Rosier to reinstate this community spectacle.
Over two nights at Pontefract Castle (25 & 26 September 2021), the trees atop the castle, looking out to the landscape beyond, were transformed into giants; representatives of the town’s ancestors and their sacred connection to the environment.
The artists worked with the local community, local historians and geologists, and poet Daisy Lafarge, in creating an expansive narrative that spanned millennia, drawing connections between human stories and their natural environment – since our earliest ancestors our fate has been, and is once again, tied to ground and nature beneath our feet.
The giants themselves were drawn from the community of Pontefract, with the work featuring moving image portraits of over thirty residents, each of whom was a living connection between past and present; between the rich geological Seam running from nearby Ferrybridge Henge, and the lives of those above. Trees have always acted as a symbolic connection between humans past and present, and here, in their branches, Pontefract Giants reopened this portal – drawing out a long forgotten animistic heritage.