Lumiere Durham 2015
December 7, 2015

DREAMERS by Elisa Artesero
I’ve previously written about my admiration of the UK’s largest light festival, Lumiere Durham. The wonder and magic that the festival creates in the picturesque northern city is an inspiration to me as an emerging light artist. It has also certainly been one of the biggest influences in my artwork development and desire to create large-scale light art for the public realm. I often wondered what I’d do if got the chance to exhibit there, and this year I got the opportunity!
DREAMERS was installed in Durham’s Crown Court Gardens. It was inspired by Japanese paper screens and the Basho Zen poem:
‘Guest’s shadow through
the paper screen – I sit dreaming over charcoal fumes’
Large letters of mirror and steel were scattered across the grass and cast shadows onto a screen. It was a sculptural space for visitors to explore and become a part of the work as either participant or viewer. A light wash from behind the letters cast their shadows onto the screen to spell the word DREAMERS along with the shadows of the visitors that animated the space with their bold light and shadow play.

Visitors enjoying casting their shadows
I was so pleased with the visitor reaction to the piece. People immediately understood the work and often spent a long time in the installation trying out different shadow effects. The space was filled with joy and laughter and it was a pleasure to see how imaginative people were with the work. There were tugs of war, dance routines, bicycles, umbrellas, kisses, hugs and many more poses throughout the weekend as each visitor cast their fleeting shadow on the screen.

Visitors getting creative with their shadows!
I think play, joy and wonder are essential parts of our lives, so to facilitate that feeling in any small manner within a piece that I create brings me much joy also. With a lot of my work I create immersive spaces that incorporate text, light, shadow and sculpture. It is often inspired by themes of transience, the nature of happiness and hope.
This year’s Lumiere was as exciting and wonderful as always. There were some amazing installations across the city, which I was also lucky enough to explore on the final night. I feel honoured to have been a part of it and it continues to inspire me to create more work.
Many thanks go to the festival producers, Artichoke, and to the generous support of Dyer Engineering who manufactured the work.

DREAMERS
Next up to show at is the Enlighten Manchester Festival of Light and Sound Art, 10th-12th December, for which I have received support using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Reflections and shadows 2014
January 11, 2015
This year I made what only existed in my mind into a reality. There’s not much more an artist can ask for, really! Here’s a recap of my artistic year gone by.
In January my degree piece ‘Leap and the Net Will Appear’ was still on show as part of the Nesta Art Showcase, selected from a national call out to be exhibited in central London at the Nesta gallery space.
In February I continued to be part of the DIY Art School, a year-long project by art school graduates wishing to continue the momentum of creative learning in the year after graduation. For this we had weekly meetings and scheduled artist talks, workshops and crits.
March saw the success of DIY Art School continue as I was asked to represent the group by giving a speech at the opening of Castlefield Gallery’s New Art Spaces, Federation House. I was pretty honoured to be speaking along side the likes of Maria Balshaw, Director of the Whitworth Gallery and Manchester Art Gallery.
Jumping ahead to May and I was selected as one of the UK representative artists for the ‘Art of Youth’ Youth in Action European Commission project in Montenegro. The programme brought together participants from across Europe to learn about different contemporary art practices, European Citizenship, and to create collaborative pieces of artwork to be exhibited in the open air amphitheatre in Old Bar, Montenegro. As well as being creatively stimulating and getting to exhibit in such an unusual space, I also made many friends that I’m still in contact with today.
I was over the moon to get Arts Council England funding in June for ‘Light Holds Me Here‘ a period of research and development of my practice to help to fuse my two creative backgrounds of light art and writing. This project helped to shape the rest of the year as I was working towards a solo exhibition and to show work in the Faroe Islands later in the year. I also started working with Curated Place, who supported my application and my progress throughout the year.
In July I also began a new research project, Manifest, with fellow artists, John Lynch and Roger Bygott. This also received Arts Council England funding and allowed us to look into the feasibility and planning of a festival that supported North West based artists and would run alongside the Manchester International Festival in 2015.
September was a red-letter kind of a month for me. I was honoured to have been selected as Tim Marlow’s Curator Choice for Fine Art for NOISE Festival 2014. I went to the press launch at the House of Commons and found out that my winning entry ‘Sun Scroll‘ was to be exhibited at the Manchester Buy Art Fair, then at the Tetley in Leeds and also a picture of it was placed on a plinth and exhibited on London’s South Bank for nearly 3 months!
I was also awarded ‘Outstanding’ for my ‘Sun Bowl’ and ‘Excellent’ for ‘Leap and the Net Will Appear’ for NOISE Festival by the CEO Denise Proctor.
Alongside this, I exhibited my final work for ‘Light Holds Me Here‘ developed over the summer in a solo exhibition of the same name at Castlefield Gallery’s New Art Spaces. An absolute dream of an experience and I was really pleased with the great feedback from visitors.
In October I developed and delivered a series of expressive drawing and working with words workshops with stroke survivors for the Stroke Association. This was a new experience for me and I was pleased that the participants enjoyed it too and created some amazing artwork in the process.
Curated Place took me to Copenhagen and then the Faroe Islands in November. In the Faroes I exhibited a poem installation, ‘Ambiguous Borders‘ together with a poem written in response to mine by Faroese poet, Oddfridur Marni Rasmussen, at the light art and literature festival, Bóka Dagar. I also had the generous support of fellow light artist, Ulf Pederson, as he enabled me to project more of my poetry onto the buildings of the Faroese National Broadcasting house.
December was another busy month as I was chosen as one of Red Bull Studios’ ‘Red Bull Collectives 2014‘. For this I got to collaborate with award-winning photographer, Layla Sailor, to creative an exhibition ‘Fragment|Reflect’ at the Red Bull Studios on Tooley Street, central London.
To end the month and year, I was awarded another Arts Council England Grants for the Arts grant to create new piece of work, ‘A Solid Wish Scatters‘ for the Enlighten Manchester festival of Light Art. I exhibited one of my largest pieces of work yet in the centre of Manchester in Piccadilly Gardens.
I couldn’t have wished for a more positive end to the year and I thank all my colleagues, sponsors and supporters who all helped to make it actually happen.
A Solid Wish Scatters
December 11, 2014
I’m really pleased to present a new public realm artwork ‘A Solid Wish Scatters’ supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
The work is on show now until Sunday 14th December as part of the Enlighten Manchester Festival of Light Art in Piccadilly Gardens run and produced by Curated Place.
‘A Solid Wish Scatters’ is an installation made of concrete blocks to echo the concrete of its surroundings. The words reflect up onto the famous concrete wall in Piccadilly Gardens. The earthly presence of the blocks scatter into an ephemeral light piece on the wall to show all that is solid is still fragile and all that is perceived to be permanent never will be. Its presentation here is using spotlights for the dark winter nights, however it is also a sunlight-activated work when re-located to a South-facing wall.
I’ll update my blog with more pictures and maybe even some video very soon. In the meantime however, pop down to look at the work for yourself!
NOISE Festival Curator Choice
September 15, 2014
I’m so pleased to announce that I’ve been selected as Tim Marlow’s Curator Choice for NOISE Festival 2014! My work ‘Sun Scroll’ was selected from over 5,000 entries to make the final 5 in the Fine Art category.
Tim Marlow is the Director of Artistic Programmes at the Royal Academy in London, so to have my work selected by him is a real honour. I was also awarded ‘Outstanding’ for my ‘Sun Bowl‘ and ‘Excellent’ for ‘Leap and the Net Will Appear‘ by Denise Proctor, Artist and CEO of NOISE charity. See more of my work on my NOISE portfolio.
“A deceptively simple idea which has great clarity of vision and a wonderfully elusive and allusive result. Deftly poetic in its means of expression as much as in its content” Tim Marlow.
I was invited to the press launch at the House of Commons last week. It was here that I was able to meet the other selected artists and to speak to Tim about why he chose my work and ask questions about the art world, galleries, exhibitions and so forth.
I was also astonished to find out that a huge 1m x 1m picture of my work is on display on a plinth outside London’s Southbank until November.
To add to the list of wonderful opportunities given by the NOISE Festival, I’ll also show my work at the Buy Art Fair Manchester 24th-28th September, and then at a special exhibition at the Leeds Tetley 3rd-5th October. I really can’t wait!
Poetry, Art, Void and Murakami
July 13, 2014
I started my Arts Council England funded project at the beginning of July and it’s been a busy couple of weeks. So far, I’ve been mixing research, writing and experimentation. One of the main objectives of this project is to create a new body of work which will fuse my own writing with my light art. In order to do this, I’ve spent a lot of my initial time writing so that I have content and potential narrative to inspire and lead the visual work.
The themes in my work are addressing ‘desire’ and ‘void’, which may seem a little antithetical at first look, but much of my work has centred on Zen poetry, the transitoriness of our existence and a desire for the intangible. This is, of course, a very short explanation, but should go some way to show my reasons for exploring the two themes. So, to start, I have been reading “Nothingness and Desire” by James W. Heisig, and “Void|In Art” by Mark Levy, PhD. These have been giving me a philosophical and artistic view and history of the themes.
I’ve also started to re-read Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore” as it’s one of my favourite books by one of my favourite writers. Murakami’s worlds are surreal, sometimes scary, sometimes magical, and often dreamlike. He writes in such a practical manner about the strangest occurrences, which serve to make them seem unnervingly real. I get so engrossed that I practically feel as if I’m living the story with the characters, particularly in his last book “1Q84”. His works inspire me more visually than in my written work, however.
Poetry-wise I have been reading and re-reading a wide range of poets, many of which are in the Bloodaxe “Staying Alive” series. I also have a collection of poetry books by individual poets that I dip into, too many to list here.
I recently went to the Liverpool Biennial, mainly as a small pilgrimage to the Adrian Henri exhibition. The Liverpool poets, Henri, McGough, Patten and Mitchell were probably the first poets that I read as a child that really got me interested in the poetic form, and I still read and am inspired by to this day. I’m enchanted by their wit, simple and effective observations, romanticism and visual play with words.
I’d never heard Henri read or sing his poems before [shocking] so it was interesting to hear him do this on the recordings. Some were much more lively than I’d imagined when I read them to myself – “Love Is” was much more upbeat than I’d ever read it to be! The artwork that accompanied many of the poems incorporated collage, sketches, paintings and sculpture. Some were placed together with a rough visual humour, whereas others, based on the more serious and romantic poems, were put together with a real tenderness. This allowed space for the poignancy of a symbol, such as a blurry bright pink heart floating close to a black void. Seeing the work in its home of Liverpool did romanticise the city somewhat, but it was a romance I was happy to indulge for the day.
Just a quick recommendation for anyone visiting Liverpool – just down the road from the University is a brilliant second-hand bookshop – Reid of Liverpool. I got five poetry books for very reasonable prices and in remarkably good condition!