Light Up Lancaster

City of Colour close up

I was recently commissioned by Green Close Studios to create a site specific piece of work for the Light Up the Streets event as part of Light Up Lancaster 2013.

I had been drawn to the architecture by the river Lune on a trip to Morecambe Bay days before I saw the advert for the expression of interest. I decided to use this scene as my inspiration, creating a smaller version in the style of a stage set to fill an empty shop window.

In my practice I use light in various different ways. My more recent work has focussed on natural sunlight to create effects and develop certain themes, so it was nice to have a change and work with artificial lighting once again. I think I’m going to work fairly seasonally from now on, working with sunlight during the lighter months and going crazy with brightly coloured artificial lights in the winter!

View to the river

Back to the work: the buildings are made into a screen to give an interesting shape and take it away from an all too literal recreation. They are however, all hand-drawn and to scale, which believe me, took quite a while to do! I made an abstract paper sky to be lit up with a brightly coloured aurora dancing above the buildings. I wanted there to be a kind of new magic to the scene so many locals will be familiar with seeing daily.

I also had the good fortune to be able to choose a line from a LitFest commissioned poem by Sarah Hymas, “By the Mouth of the Lune”. I partially cut the words out of the silver card I was using as the representation of the river, and stood them on end to reflect the bright blue light and into the silver as if ripples on the water. The line read:

A slivering luminescence and a flatness

that slips and transmutes through

the music of a blue man’s riddle

(From S. Hymas’ poem “By the Mouth of the Lune”)

I felt that these words gave an abstract, yet visually descriptive, quality to the scene and helped to tie it together.

City of Colour

Feedback on the night from visitors was really positive. Many took pictures or had their picture taken in front of the work, others gazed at it for quite a while, looking at the aurora dance of the sky; and children in particular were excited by the scale of the work (the buildings often being their height).

The aurora in the sky

Apologies for the cafe logo in some of the pictures. The piece was housed in a shopping arcade, so light from other shops reflected onto the window.