ANYONE who has visited the great Tisbury tithe barn, now home to the Messums West contemporary art gallery, will understand why the word “cathedral” comes to mind – and the new installation, Forest Cathedral, takes this as its inspiration, creating a powerful experience for visitors to the 700-year old building, with its awe-inspiring, soaring timber roof structure.

Created by the Berlin-based artist Andrew Amondson, Forest Cathedral transforms the 13th century barn, with its tree-like beams, into a living forest of light and sound. A kinetic sculpture of branching limbs and mirrored leaves gently moves with air currents created by visitors, filtering light through this forest canopy.

This immersive installation is a collaboration between Messums, Forest of Imagination, Bath Spa University and Winchester Cathedral. It offers an experience that reconnects visitors with the forest of our imagination, a nature that has always been part of how we think, feel and make sense of the world.

A dimensional soundscape created with Ananda Costa completes the installation including deep grounding tones of forest floor and root systems which rise through rustling mid-range frequencies to the bright presence of canopy birdsong. Forest Cathedral unites light and sound as wavelengths. These wavelengths move through space, connecting visitors onto the same frequencies.

Forest Cathedral is described as “a listening,” taking the age and material of a 13th century barn and reintroducing elements of its sound and senses.

As Hamlet says to the Player King, talking about the importance of acting, “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature,” so, at Forest Cathedral, art holds a mirror up to nature – the experience reflects our own relationships to the forest of our imagination, inviting us to rediscover our shared language with an ecology that is deeply entangled with who we are.

During the exhibition programme, there will be late openings – “Lates” – where you can book to meditate and spend extended time in the barn under the forest canopy, immersing yourself in the experience. And if you feel like staying for a sleepover in the barn, to spend a night beneath the canopy and wake up inside the forest, contact the Messums West office.

The barn has been listening for 700 years and those echoes are part of how we try to understand the future. Forest Cathedral, which runs throughout June and July, is open to all and entry is free of charge. The installation is designed to tour England’s most significant Gothic cathedrals.