On a Wing and a Prayer

A Multimedia Installation for Bats in Churches

There is something magical about the relationship between bats and churches. When these fascinating winged mammals choose our sacred spaces as their homes, they become our neighbours. They also become unintentional ambassadors for the natural world. Church bats remind us of our connection to nature. They also remind us how important it is to live in harmony with other beings, no matter how different to us they may be.
 
'On a Wing and a Prayer' is a tribute, not just to bats and the historic churches they inhabit but also to the communities who share their space with these remarkable animals.  My aim was to bring people and bats together into a greater understanding – an understanding based on emotion and empathy, rather than hard science.

To create this art work, I collaborated with the community of Compton Martin, Somerset, whose Grade I listed Norman church, St Michael the Archangel, is one of Bats in Churches' project churches. Not only are the people of Compton Martin excited and inspired by their church bats, but they also have poetry in their souls. I wove their lyrical comments into this piece, both as part of the installation and also as an original poem, which soars and sparkles like the bats it celebrates.
 
To evoke the spirit of bats in churches, I designed 'On a Wing and a Prayer' as a multimedia experience. The large-scale images are based on my own selective-focus photographs of churches, blended with additional imagery as well as snippets of text. Printed on transparent natural fabric, each of the four images represents a different aspect of the enduring relationship between bats and sacred spaces.
 
For the accompanying soundscape, I used bat calls which were recorded in several Bats in Churches project churches during the 2022 survey season. Those recordings, which you can hear here, were slowed down 16x via time expansion, to make them audible to human ears. The final soundscape sounds much like birdsong, which is what the bats themselves hear as they forage and call to one another on the wing, gracing our churches with their presence.

'On a Wing and a Prayer' was exhibited at St Michael's Church in Compton Martin, Somerset in Autumn 2022. It then travelled to churches in Wiltshire, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk before landing at St Paul's in Chacewater, Cornwall, which will be the final stop on its year-long tour of England.

After five successful years of helping church communities find ways of coexisting in harmony with their resident bats. the Bats in Churches Project will conclude in September 2023. But its legacy of resources and useful information will continue to exist and can be accessed here.