Four years ago my brother did not invite me to Lumiere, because it had not occurred to him that I might want to go. Two years ago, he did. Perhaps because he knew me a little better by then, or perhaps only because his wife did not want to go. We had a great time. So this year he asked as soon as it was announced, long before tickets went on sale. Of course, I wanted to go again. Even before I heard the news that this might be last one. That would be sad.
It will be sad if this really is the last time the artistry of light comes to the City of Durham and brings so many people into a space that is more than a 'space', that is a shared 'experience', that is the kind of artistic connection that so many of the people who turn out to walk around it would not do in any other context.
It is entirely possible that every other year one or two people walk around the Lumiere exhibits and think differently as a result - maybe more optimistically, maybe more creatively, maybe more ambitiously, or maybe even just more calmly. That has to be important. The point about art is that we can never know the point of any particular piece for any particular individual.
I'm confident in saying that a goodly proporrtion of those people who wander around the Durham light show never set foot in an art gallery or a museum. That the only photographs they look at are Insta snaps and family WhatsApps. Frankly, and you're free to disagree, this is guerilla art on a large scale. This is what I'm lovingly seeing councils up & down the country doing when they commision murals on bare-brick walls. So many people only think they don't like or don't understand "art" because it's been locked away from them. Put it on the streets - in murals or in lights - and let them see it for free (or a few pennies if you need crowd control) - and do not tell them it's "art" - and just maybe they'll love it and think about it and move on from there.
I think this matters. I think it is important. If people can be serruptitiously be brought into the art world, they can be seduced into their own creativity. I think this matters. I think this is important.
Maybe that is just my opinion, but I lost count of how many times I heard the words '"it'll be sad if it doesn't happen again" during the course of the evening. The other expressions that kept emerging, beyond sadness, were disbelief. It did not seem possible that such an event could run out of steam. These people felt that if it did not happen, their lives would be poorer. They felt that something was suddenly being denied to them. Even if they couldn't begin to articulate what that was.
What it is: is art! Free and on the streets.
What it is: is community coming together to celebrate different kinds of creativity - even if they don't understand the wisdom, they get the beauty and that's a good thing. And to be honest, if you listen closely, you will hear the beginnings of conversations about the what and why...and some of those conversations are starting with the very young.
You can't beat a pretty light - especially if you want to start a conversation with a very young child!
As ever, I'm late to this particular party. But the locals aren't - and they show up - they get on buses, they fill P&R car parks, they buy fast food or book restauarant tables - they buy trashy trinkets for their kids - maybe more importantly, they learn the streets of their County town. They walk into the Cathedral, not just in passing, but after having queued to do so. They walk along the river bank in the dark. They talk to each other. If nothing else, having a family on a river bank talking to each other rather than sitting in front of a screen not doing so...surely there is a tangible in that.
But I’m jumping ahead. Let me back-track.
We’d decided to go earlier this year, so we began at the Millburn Bridge, with darkness not yet full, meeting Heron [i]. It seems that we may owe her anapology for not having made her acquaintance before. She first flew in for Lumiere in 2017 and became a permanent fixture. The patience of the harnser – as they are known in my adopted county of Norfolk – is well-known, but holding her pose for nearly a decade is above and beyond. I gather she was allowed a rest while Northumbrian Water did works nearby – so maybe I’m forgiven, maybe she was away last time I was here. But she’s back and she’s beautiful.
I was suitably taken with the arrest of her movement in flight, and the light of her wings, but then “There!” I squealed. My brother looked at me. “Actual heron,” I said…and moved to lean over the wall. As it turned out, that was also a rubbish photo…but the kind you keep because even rubbish photos hold perfect memories. An actual heron – my favourite bird – alighting for me as a welcome to any walk, but to do so at the beginning of this evening, saying hello to her namesake...that was a little bit special.
We walked along the riverbank, following our instincts rather than the map – not least because the downloadable map on the web was different from the interactive map on the app, and there were rumours that neither matched what was on the ground, and certainly the volunteers were using
yet another version. No matter. It’s not like we had planned out a route. Perhaps we should have – then maybe we wouldn’t have missed anything – but surely part of the joy of any gallery visit – including outdoor galleries – is the haphazard, not knowing what you will find next, what you will by-pass, what will arrest you and make you stand still for a while. I loved not necessarily knowing what would come next. I deliberately didn’t research the exhibits ahead of time.
And it would turn out that of the ones we missed, there was only one that we’d actually “miss” in the sense of maybe wishing we'd seen.
We wandered at will. Consulting the map when we couldn’t spot the next thing along or find people to follow or spot signage.
Later, outside the Cathedral, I would said “You cannot beat a pretty light. My inner child is very happy.” You can’t. She was. Is. This kind of spectacle can be approached as an art critic, or as a child. I believe the child has the better experience…and will hold the joy of it for longer. And not just the joy – the awe – the historic imagery – the intangible oh?! of it all.
Maybe also the messages that lurked within many of the artworks.
We passed Bernd Spiecker’s Light Benches[ii]- another perrmanent installation for the last decade, watched their colour cycle and, if we’re honest, felt nothing very much. Sometimes things lose themselves in the masses. I might have found these benches more entrancing on an ordinary Winter night as unexpected discoveries. We are judged by the company that we keep. Sadly.
I must learn not to do that.
Likewise, Lampounette was so underwhelming as to be something we would not have spotted to be part of the installation without the sign pointing to it. A giant desk lamp on a riverside walk – well, obviously. Maybe it’s just me, but that is beyond ‘art’ into mildly interesting architecture. I imgaine it staying there. I imagine nobody really paying it much attention.
Or maybe – probably – being me – I was distracted by the bonfire. I haven’t had a real bonfire for several years. I have lamenting their absence from my birthday celebrations. So Vendel & De Wolf’s Sign was always going to be one of my favourite pieces whatever else came after. Even this early in the evening. Even though it is such a simple understated piece. A realistic shifting of light-flames and shooting sparks drew people to stand close, hoping for a warmth that the illusion doesn’t give – unless by virtue of the memory of all those other fires – the destructive and the joyful, the fertilising, the baking, the ritual. We are all moths, drawn to the flame.
My brother would, later, wonder if any of the pieces of the Elysium would be for sale. He wanted one for his garden. Me, I’d take a smaller version of Sign.
From the fire to water, the flame to the fall. As Water Falls[iii] A digital waterrfall that responded to touch by either shifting its falling pattern or becoming building-blocky green and reds. A cube, of which we only got to see one side; I don’t know if that impacted on the response of the “organic” shifting of patterns. Perhaps we were meant to sweep our hands across, rather than simply placing them here, or there. Perhaps it responded block to lack of flow. There was no clear way to interact, no knowing what the fall would do. It shifted between the beautiful watery downpour, to white-noise-static. I was not sure what to make of it. The volunteer guides loved it. “I want to stay here all night,” one of them said, “just watching their reactions…it’s such a joy.” And let’s face it, the world can always use a little more joy.
I remembered Helvetictoc from our last visit – the clock that tells the time in words, projected onto the side of a building. Apparently, seeing the time expressed in the kind of words we used to use: it’s nearly twenty past five, for example, activates a different part of the brain than if we simply saw the digital numbers 17:18.
I’ve also heard that seeing the time on an analogue clockface also registers differently. It has been shown that if you glance at a clock-face, registering the images of the face and the relative positions of the hands, you will retain the “time” you have just seen more surely and for far longer than if you check a digital rendition. It would seem that we are hard-wired for shapes and words, in a way that we are not for numbers.
How much of that is true? I can only speak for myself. The number of times I check the time on my phone, but it doesn’t actually register and I have to look again a few minutes later.
Plus: digital watches kind of came and went…and a lot of the electronic watches on the market today, although capable of digital display also offer up an analogue rendition – as indeed my phone does. That says it all. We teach children to “tell the time” by the images, not by the numbers and that is what sticks.
We are picture driven. We are words-anchored. The numbers that drive our lives are beyond most of us.
~ / ~
In every event, there is that moment you look back on and think: I didn’t give that one the attention it deserves. This time it was AnastasiaIsachsen’s Point of (No) Return.[iv] Ice melting into water, refreezing, or not…the proximity of human…without understanding exactly where or when our movements would be causation. Maybe that is part of the point – that it wasn’t clear when doing whatever we wanted had no impact and when it would dramatically change what happened next. There is deep meaning in the piece…and I would have valued time to sit with it and think about it…but equally I want to revisit it simply to watch its monochrome psychedelic shifts, purely for the
iridescent shimmering mesmerising beauty of it.
Sometimes, though, you are with someone who doesn’t “get” why you’re lingering, and sometimes you just go with the flow. We walked on. We paused at some of the Entanglement is ‘roadsigns’, but again, gave them less thought than they warranted. What we see depends so much upon who we see it with. What we see, rests partly upon what they see. I wonder how it would be to walk through the same installations on consecutive nights with different individuals. How different would my experience of each piece be as a result.
I have an answer to that, in principle at least. Last year I did two concerts of the same tour with different people. I know exactly how much difference it makes. And if this really is the last year of Lumiere, I won’t get to do that experiment here. Sadly.
But I digress…
Rhizome was strung over the market place, which was precisely the wrong place for it. It needs a more natural back-drop; it needs to be strung among the trees. Here it was nothing more than a lot of coloured string on scaffolding. Mostlyit reminded me of my friend’s daughter who, many years ago, created a string stranglehold on all of the furniture in her bedroom. To be fair, hers didn’t glow different colours or have sound effects, but even so. This was ineffective, purely due to its placement. We walked through…and on.
Fluorecycle[v] was a simple side-street diversion. Bicycle wheels illuminated. What struck me most was how easily I found myself walking ahead while looking up, and so walking into people doing the same. Not wanting to watch where I was going, because the pretty wheels had my attention. I heard someone ask, with deep concern, “are you ok?” I heard my brother insisting that he was. I guess he’d stumbled or fallen or, like me, had not been paying attention to the ground, because the space between it and the sky was more important, or at least more beautiful. When I looked round, he was shaking off the concern of strangers. I let him do so. We walked on.
We walked on.
We walked.
The installation we had both most wanted to see, to experience rather, was the Elysium Garden[vi]. Elysium is that mythical place in the afterlife reserved for heroes – but in this day and age we’ve lost sight of what it means to be a hero, or perhaps what a hero is, has changed.
Jig Cochrane’s field of colourful giant blooms was originally commissioned to celebrate the life of Bodyshop founder Anita Roddick. It is founded in joy and has gradually built up over twenty years, evolving and seeking to be sustainable, with new varieties of flower being added each season. The official blurb says that it offers a kaleidoscopic profusion of colour, providing a space for reflection, peace and wonder, the towering blooms speak the unwritten language of empathy, taking viewers to a place of bliss between this world and another.
Aye, well, maybe. All I know is that my brother loved it for reasons he didn’t try to explain…though he wanted to take one of those flowers home for his own garden…
And me? Well, I just kept looking. And breathing. And looking. And drinking it in. The shifting colour-scape. The flower-shapes. I wanted to be able to walk among them, which on this occasion we weren’t permitted to do. I kept taking pictures. Just in case I might forget.
Lest we forget. And the child in me said “you can’t beat a pretty light” but you can if you make a pretty shape out of it, and make that shape bigger than you are, if you echo natural beauty in a way that makes us want to both bathe in the artwork and go back to the inspiration for it. This is 3-D ArtNouveau, and if it weren’t raining you could have sat me down there and come back for me two hours later.
But it was raining, not enough to be unpleasant, but enough to not want to step out of the line and sit hippy-style on the grass. Not that we were allowed to do that anyway.
As we walked around the edge of Elysium we joined the queue to enter the Cathedral.
It was raining. Not heavily, but wetly. People pulled up their hoods, raised their umbrellas, shepherded their children. We walked through those metal-barricaded serpentine paths that you get wherever there are people to control into a winding pathway… I kept looking back at Elysium…I kept looking up at the subtly lit walls of the Catheral…I kept stepping out of time.
We didn’t speak much. There wasn’t much to say. We walked slowly, in line, in the rain. We were both smiling. Looking at the flowers. It struck me that this was so much like a mediaeval pilgrimage … this long line of people, in the dark, in the rain, happily waiting to walk into the Cathedral church of St Cuthbert. The line snaked on. Children played. Adults talked, or didn’t. Everyone seemed to be smiling. No-one complained about the weather or the waiting.
Into the Cathedral.
Everyone Ever[vii] somehow didn’t really work in that space. We paused. Sat. Looked up and around. For me, it seemed that the stonework, the history of this place, the presence of its own past, overshadowed the projection. The images faded into the ancient stones. Like, maybe, the Cathedral itself was saying yes, but you know what…my people have their own story..as important as yours…stay with us…but more gently…backdrop yourself maybe… Or perhaps the walls aren’t solid-enough – in the sense that they are broken by archways and windows…it would work better in a castle keep…or perhaps a deeper, less-subtle, definition would have played better. Don’t know.
We walked up the Nave, cleared of the chairs that have long since replaced permanent pews, if ever there were any. Again, in mediaeval times, this would have been empty space, standing space, a place for the ordinary to come and hear the service. Candles were being lit in the transept. I hoped enough of the prayers were for peace and tolerance and acceptance. It felt fitting that the empty seats around the walls were lit blood-red. For sacrifice; for the victims; for failure. Nothing changes.
The pilgrimage continued to circuit the cloister. Solace[viii] is a piece that does not photograph well. It is one I would like to experience alone, in the silence of the nighted cloister. Paper lanterns, suspended moments in time. Given the devastation such lanterns can cause in the natural world when we release them to the skies, here is another way, tethering them briefly, in a sky-filled
space. Shown in communion like this, there is a sense of flight, without the wildlife danger entailed in the reality. There is also the pause. Everything today is about the movement. This piece echoes the space of its installation. Cloisters were for walking, but walking slowly, and also for sitting. Cloisters are about stillness. They are about the moments apart. I am pleased to have captured one shot with the artwork to the side, and behind the tracery of the windows and the blue-light from inside the church itself, with the smudged figures of fellow pilgrims. If you look very closely you can see the ancient stonework of the cloister walls as light-shadows in the dark.
Shadows. We emerged from the church into the Garden of Shadows[ix]- spectrality that might, again, have been better served by a better backdrop…and again, I’m not sure I caught the best of it…the ghosts of farmers and miners…walking towards oblivion through ghostly ferns and half-formed trees…I stopped and waited. You know that feeling when you know you are missing something…that was here. There was a poignancy, that I failed to catch a hold of… and it is true. A little web-search showed me that there is more to this work (as there is to many of them) that can actually be shown in the constraints of Lumiere. The Garden of Shaows[x] was previously seen at the National Botanic Garden of Ireland in 2023 as part of the Dublin Fringe festival. That was an extended version of what was brought to Durham. I plunged in, trying to find the official title of what I am simply calling “The Tree”.
This was my magic moment of this year’s festival. Watching this air-hanging tree grow and shift and change and shrink and grow and eventually fall into a single decaying leaf. I am not a milennial. I do not bring out my phone at the drop of a hat to start videoing…but at the drop of a mid-air tree… yes. I did my best to capture it on my second (or third) viewing…and yes, I’ve sent it to so many people that I have to apologise if you know me and haven’t had it land in your in-box. That moment.
That six or seven or eight minutes of magic.
I will watch my scrappy video of that over and over.
Sometimes…it isn’t worth even trying to find the words.
I think it was originally entitled Still the Trees, but I could be mis-attributing. You’ve got the web too – do your own research – and if you get the chance to see it: do go!
That bit about ‘you can’t beat a pretty light’? It seems that you can, with a semi-holographic floating tree.
After that…watching Cédric Le Borgne’s carp floating among the trees on the far side of the Prebend Bridge felt…hmm, well, not exactly normal, but perhaps ‘appropriate’? Fitting? Joyful and delightful and part of the magical world that I felt I had entered. There were so many things to simply LOVE this year. By ‘love’ I mean take to heart, to take joy from, to smile at, to know that I will carry the images not just in my computer files but in my mind for a long time. I was reminded again about my ‘why’ for taking photographs.
Don’t get me wrong, I love it on the rare occasions that they work as ‘art’, but mostly, the ones that speak to me are the ones that matter. The ones that I can step back into. Like the heron at the beginning, like our Elysium-lit pilgrimage to the Cathedral, like the back-light of the cloister, and like one of Borgne’s carp looking right at the camera. White lights floating among the trees can be more affecting than the most complex installations.
From there we simply walked along the glittering grove: disco-ball-lit river bank. Sparkles on the bank and the occasional confusion, before we realised it was simply light falling on outgrowth of
willow over the water, beauty is also simply and serendipitously created. Or maybe they agonised for weeks over exactly where to site those balls and lights?
We did not see everything. We saw all but one of what we really wanted to see, and lots of things we didn’t know were waiting for us. We looked up the things we missed and thought oh well.
It has taken me two weeks to write this extended blog. And I’m sure it’s still scrappy, but sometimes that has to do.
In the interim I toyed with the idea that I was trying to write this the wrong way, and that maybe I shouldn’t write it at all, but each time I came back to it I felt two things. The first was that I can’t write this any other way…and the second was:this might be the last Durham Lumiere, so I can’t not write it at all.
I wonder how much I may have missed in the years before. I will never know. I will only be grateful for having been there in 2023 and again this year. And I will be sad if no way can be found to keep bringing light workers and light artists to Durham. If every two years is not possible, maybe every five?
I’ve listed a few links below because… you need to see whatI’m talking about. If Durham can’t find a way to keep it going, hopefully we will find other places to see the work of these amazing light-workers. I use that term advisedly – anyone using light in art, is a lightworker in the other sense, and I am grateful for their presence in the world.
[i] Durham Heron In County Durham -Fabulous North
[ii] LumiereFestival 8. Lightbenches
[iii] LumiereFestival 12. As Water Falls
[iv] LumiereFestival 14. POINT OF (NO) RETURN
[v] LumiereFestival 16. FluoreCycle
[vi] LumiereFestival 18. Elysium Garden
[vii] LumiereFestival 19. EVERYONE EVER
[viii]LumiereFestival 20. Solace
[ix] LumiereFestival 21. The Garden of Shadows
[x] TheGarden of Shadows – Jony Easterby
