Lumiere: The Peninsula

On the first day of Lumiere - Thursday ten days ago, but who's counting? - we reckoned that things were just going to get busier as the weekend progressed, and that today was therefore our best option for visiting what were likely to be the most popular items, in the centre of town. This was the area which was entrance by ticket only in the early evening, so we ate first and then headed in to town just after the gates opened. The first thing we saw - and we stepped into St Margaret's churchyard for a distant preview - was the moon:

This is the closer view, as it looked down over entrance point and railings of Framwelgate Bridge. Hannah Fox's 'Our Moon' is a digitally generated face projected onto the Castle wall: four faces in all, a different one for each night of the festival, and each one composed from the scanned faces of a number of local people, whose moving expressions drove the movements of the moon face. All of which seems over elaborate - and why create an incentive to revisit that part of the festival which you know will be oversubscribed, instead of encourage visitors to explore more widely? But I liked the way I caught sight of the face from different points in the city, and came to respond to it as a friendly presence.

( There's more... )

But as we walked home past the allotments, there was one last glimpse of Our Moon.