Lumiere London

The Light of the Spirit, Patrice Warrener

 

Back in January I visited the Lumiere London Light Festival with other members of Canterbury based The Student Makers Market. Lumiere was a new art light festival that took place over four evenings in central London. The main roads that the festival took place on were closed to vehicles, allowing spectators to walk the festival routes easily. We attended Lumiere on the last day of the event on the Sunday. We were originally planning to see all of the installations in the festival by walking and using the tube system to get around. Unfortunately, many of the tube lines and stations around the festival areas were closed due to crowding, so we had to do our best on foot. We still managed to see a lot of the festival.

Piccadilly, NOVAK

Garden of Light, TILT

We concentrated on viewing the installations in the Piccadilly, Westminster and Kings Cross areas. The types of artworks that we saw ranged from projections, to illuminated structures at street level to inflated items situated over the streets. My personal favorite pieces were The Light of the Spirit by Patrice Warrener and Les Lumineoles by Porte par Le vent. 

The Light of the spirit was a colourful projection on to the west gate of Westminster Cathedral, you can see a photograph of this piece at the top of the blog. Patrice Warrener used bright almost psychedelic colour to pick out the details of the original stonework down to tiny details on the robes of the Saints figures above the door. I felt that this brought the history of the building to life in a new way.

Les Lumineoles consisted of large inflated illuminated fish that were hung above Regent Street, there were also illuminated Lilly flowers at street level. The movements of the fish were set to atmospheric music. This piece was extremely impressive and made me feel like I was at the bottom of a river looking up at the fish swimming above. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to get a good picture of Les Lumineoles but you can find great videos and pictures of it on the internet if you want to know more

London, Janet Echelman

By the end of the evening we were all super exhausted from walking around 10 miles and couldn't wait to get the train back home. We all really loved the event! It was great to experience being able to walk around a completely pedestrianized central London amongst beautiful art pieces this was the largest light festival that I have experienced in person and I hope that Lumiere returns to London again in the future.

Goodbye for now! Nicola