Tim Woodward’s Ring Around the Dowser 2014 films American minimalist Donald Judd’s concrete sculpture Untitled 1977 on the bank of Lake Aasee in Münster, Germany. Judd’s artwork was originally commissioned for the first ‘Skulptur Projekte Münster’, an influential decennial exhibition of outdoor sculpture. Judd’s public sculpture, encrusted with graffiti and littered with various debris, is now woven into the life of the city. In Woodward’s video, a German Catholic priest stands with Judd’s sculpture and describes how church buildings are consecrated through religious ritual and later taken over for alternate use. Bringing these parallel narratives together, Woodward explores broader ideas of cultural inheritance, humanity’s relationship to its material surroundings, and how meaning shifts over time.

The film’s title, Ring Around the Dowser, refers to the ‘ring’ apparatus that blocks light in a cinema projector and the divination practice of ‘dowsing’ to locate buried or concealed things. This cryptic title highlights how Woodward and the priest in his film reveal hidden histories and is visually replicated in the video itself when the priest steps inside the concentric circles of Judd’s sculpture.