The Organ Pipe Project
A church organ in deepest Dorset was being dismantled and artists were invited to reinvent an organ pipe each for an exhibition and concert. The shortest was around 30cm, the longest approaching two metres. Mine was somewhere in-between. I repurpose mens’ jackets, making bags; reclaim the pockets! and thought I could make a bespoke one for the pipe. Thus was Arthur invented. You can read his story below.
Arthur Notnats was a mild, dusty man on the near side of middle age, quietly invisible, slightly obsessed.
Arthur lived for music. He could produce the most extraordinary tapestries of mellifluent harmonies, capering fugues and rousing crescendos from his instrument of choice, a crumbling church organ: its back slowly rotting and its pipes creaking skyward. With fingers dancing over the keys and feet pumping swan–like beneath, Arthur would elicit a rich palette of frequencies, painting the air around him with the most exquisite layering of tones and melodies until the rafters were coated and the congregation cloaked in a glimmering shawl of sound.
Arthur had a favourite tone; it came from a pipe a little over a yard long and reminded him of a childhood holiday spent mudlarking on a busy corner of the Thames. It produced a timbre of the deepest, burnt orange and gladdened Arthur’s heart whenever it sounded.
Over time the organ, pervaded by damp, fell, key by key, into dissonance. Arthur, hapless in the face of such decay and in a quite unseemly moment of immorality, stole the beloved pipe away.
Arthur took it with him everywhere. He was careful to conceal it in an old sheet believing – correctly as it transpired – that a yard and a half of wooden organ pipe would be rendered near invisible were it covered in a tatty bit of bed linen! The sheet however proved difficult to fasten; a corner would flop in the mud or slide to one side ever threatening to reveal it’s clandestine treasure.
Thus it was that Arthur decided to fashion a bag befitting of its contents. He raided his meagre wardrobe of elderly jackets, and spent a little too many candlelit hours stitching a bespoke, tailored bag. It was a wonderful thing and caused Arthur to beam.
Sad to say, the bag saw little use, for on its very first outing (a train ride to Christchurch to visit a favourite teashop), Arthur, alone in his carriage, dared to unbutton both inner and outer fastenings, and allowed himself to admire the pipe in all its wooden glory. Arthur smiled. The sun shone, the train trundled and Arthur fell into a blissful snooze. On arriving in Christchurch, the pipe was gone!
No clue was left as to its whereabouts. Arthur was bereft, inconsolable, rendered silent. He left the now useless bag in the carriage and disappeared, like his pipe, without trace.
The bag was recovered by a vigilant stationmaster and (after an appropriate time lingering in lost property), was taken home to house his burgeoning collection of beer mats.
Arthur was never seen again but it has been told that the pipe continued on its travels, the rich orange timbre being heard as far away as Sussex.
