Lumiere gets ready to go with a bang
Preparations are in full swing to transform Durham for this year’s Lumiere light festival spectacular.
From interactive displays to awe-inspiring pieces in the sky, 29 artworks will take over Durham City for the four-day festival, which runs from Thursday to Sunday.
At St Oswald’s Church in the city, University of Sunderland students have joined volunteers to help install What Matters, two immersive light and glass installations which depict the birth of light in the universe.
Hours of painstaking work have gone into creating 2,000 glass shards representing the fragments of the galaxy after the Big Bang, which will be suspended in the church, while giant glass bubbles will be hung in the churchyard to represent what happened before the Big Bang.
The large-scale piece, which has been a year in the making, is the brainchild of London-based artists Ed Shuster and Claudia Moseley.
Inspiration for the piece came from Ed’s PHD on philosophy of technology and cosmology and the pair decided to create a piece to depict the evolution of the universe.
Ed said: “A lot of our recent work has been about the role of glass in technology and science. Glass lenses are the medium through which we understand the nature of space and time. So that relationship between glass and light is elemental.
“We were also inspired after seeing this church. Churches have a long history of stained glass, which changes colour as the light shines through. So the piece is a representation of old church architecture and our contemporary view of cosmology.”
The artists worked with the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University and the National Glass Centre to help create the installation.