City of Lights

[shewhomust]

Last year, Durham was granted Enlightenment; this year we had Lumiere. Another November, another arts event cum festival of electric lighting - except that apparently the two are unconnected, different organisers, different commissioning bodies. Which is odd because I would have said that Lumiere answered a number of my criticisms of Enlightenment: specifically, it engaged more with the city, instead of being imposed upon it, and it proposed only reasonable secure well-lit walking routes. Was it as easy on the eye? I thought so, but don't take my word for it, come for a walk round and see for yourself.

The event ran for four evenings; we went into town on two of them, and we didn't see everything.

On Friday we had been out at a meeting in Elvet, and walked back across Kingsgate Bridge and up to the cathedral. We caught the end of son et lumière show on the cathedral, and were impressed enough to want to see more - but not at the cost of standing in what was now quite heavy rain for another half hour.

Instead we made our way into the cathedral, which wasn't as easy as it sounds - a mixture of crowd control and actual crowds - where a series of heavy lamps (they reminded me of the kind of traffic lights you sometimes see strung above the roadway) were swinging to and fro to the accompaniment of strange chirping sounds. the description here makes it look much darker than it was, and also more spacious - the lights were quite low above the nave. I found this work - light and sound - quite unsettling, and was very reluctant to walk down the nave below it, as we had to, to reach the cloister. I reacted strongly to it, but I've no idea whether this was the intended reaction.

The cloister was almost completely dark, lit only by the glowing ends of a forest of conjurors' magic wands. The lights were supposed to be triggered by the passage of the visitors, but there were so many people there that the lights barely went out. Some of those people were small children, not much taller than the rods, who got very excited and thrashed with their hands to make the lights react, so the intended soundtrack was drowned by the clattering of the rods. Still, the cloisters in the dark, with the eerie blue of the spotlights illuminating the sky like the aurora borealis and staining the crossing tower indigo - that's got to be worth something.

Nine Men Drawing in the College, on the green behind the cathedral, was supposed to be a series of self portraits by members of the art class in Durham Prison (but credited to artist Ron Haselden, I don't know why. Nor do I know why a set of unrelated drawings - different subject matter, different styles - had been substituted for the portraits, nor whether the original plan would have worked better. I didn't hate what I saw, but it felt rather pointless, like someone else's home-made Christmas decorations.

Perhaps I was just too cold and wet to respond. We struggled down Saddler Street - more crowds, and I've no idea whether they were heading for the cathedral or whether they were just the Friday night pub crawl - and failed to be beguiled by the great ballooning commedia dell'arte figures in Silver Street, and the shower of fragments of light, like hundreds and thousands on the wet ground (again, there was in any case too much of a crowd to play in the light: but by now all I wanted was a hot bath.

We almost didn't go out on Saturday - we'd been to a lunchtime party, and consumed much pizza and fizz, and a quiet evening at home had a certain appeal. But it was a dry, mild evening, and we soon got into the mood. It helped that our route started with a pleasant surprise. The Bottle Festoon was announced as something local residents could participate in making - just bring an empty plastic bottle to the library... This sounded terribly worthy, but the resultant glittering objects were charming. They hung in the unglamorous setting of a fenced off corner of the car-park outside the ice rink, but the previous day's heavy rain had spread a puddle beneath them, so that the lights shone both above and below, and it was funny and pretty and sent me on my way ready to be pleased with what I might see.

Well, not the red and green neon lights in Millennium Place, Maybe (ah, the description says: "The visitor is invited to walk..." between the lights, triggering changes of colour. THat might have been fun. But you couldn't walk through it, it was railed off...). Nor the photographic portraits projected onto Saint Nick's - a pale shadow of the wonderful show up at the cathedral. Echelle was a disappointment: I loved the idea of an illuminated ladder tucked away in the little yard, but it wasn't switched on (here's how it was supposed to look).

Work in Progress was one of my favourite pieces. A collection of road-menders' tools and signs abandoned at the far end of Fowler's Yard, perfectly ordinary except for a filament of neon outlining the wheelbarrow, the spade, the hard hats... except, wait, what's that road sign? Biscuits for 400 yards? And while you are distracted by this, a pile of traffic cones sidles up to you...

We dragged ourselves away and went up to the cathedral in time to catch the next showing of the son et lumière: which really was quite spectacular. The choice of images was simple but appropriate; details of the cathedral itself, the masonry and stained glass, pages from illuminated manuscripts, including the Lindisfarne Gospels, suggested a simple narrative, the transfer of Cuthbert's relics to their new home in Durham. I was particularly taken with this depiction of the building of the new cathedral. (As with all the pictures, click it to see a larger version - and with this one it might be worth looking at the larger size, too). An excuse to stand and gaze at the cathedral - no, better even than that, a way to focus your gaze on the cathedral for a quarter hour or so: how could it fail?

And how do you follow that? We told ourselves we were on our way home, we'd walk along the riverbank - but first, what was that under Elvet Bridge? It was, in fact, Simon Corder's Winter Garden - rather a grandiose title for two clusters of neon lights, one a patch of sickly green perilously close to the rushing floodwaters under the bridge, the other in shades of purple hanging from a tree close to the bridge. It doesn't sound much, but it worked, it made a little enchanted space beyond the bridge.

We could have returned through the Prince Bishops shopping centre, but we turned back the way we had come, through the alleyway past Klute night-club - and realised that the illumination where this passed under the bridge came from bouquets of neon tubes thrust into wheelie bins. Was this part of the garden, planned all along? Or was it a last minute inspiration, a solution to an unforeseen problem? Either way, it illuminated what could have been an awkward walk, and made me smile in the same way as that importunate stack of traffic cones.

We crossed the peninsula and came down to the river again at Framwellgate Bridge. I'm assuming all this stretch came under the Flux umbrella, but what we saw had so little of the magic of the advance illustrations of this piece that I'm wondering whether the high water made the artists reconsider their plans. There were coloured lights playing on the bridge itself, and a green spotlight made something strange - a sort of heightened naturalness - of the tree at the foot of the bridge, but thereafter all we saw were neon tubes of different colours strung along the handrail and leaning on the trees further up the banks. This was brash and unsubtle: you saw the lights themselves, not the light they cast, and I wished the lighting could have been more indirect (on reflection, the Bottle Festoon would have been wonderful here, though I suppose this would have required an unreasonable number of units).



But there was the river, rushing by closer to the path than usual (beware of people in a hurry carrying tripods!), and there was the cathedral painted an unaccustomed shade of blue, and, finally there was the Old Fulling Mill in its multicoloured glory - with a restored mill-wheel of light turning in the current. This, I think, must have been one of the Hi-Lights. These weren't listed, but offered as "surprises", so I hope I am not mis-attributing work - anyway, I loved this simple but striking marriage of site and lighting. Now the height of the water, which I had been considering as a problem for the artists, struck me as a lucky chance as well as an unlucky one, picking up the light and throwing it back at the viewer. Even the green laser, which in itself I thought rather pointless, glimmered eerily on the turbulent brown waters.

We paused on Prebends Bridge, but saw nothing more, and went home satisfied. We hadn't seen either of the theatrical presentations, and although we had intended to try to do so, I don't think I would have enjoyed the crowds. We hadn't seen the separate event at the Botanic Gardens, and didn't regret spending our time in the city centre - though I was sorry not to have followed up the glimpse we caught of Old Shire Hall. My pictures aren't technically all that great, but I'm pleased to have caught so much of what I'd seen, using ISO 3200 and holding the camera by hand. I'd have liked to try using the 'fireworks' setting, but only realised afterwards that the reason this wasn't too successful was that the icon I had taken for a firework represented 'indoor' settings; fireworks were depicted by what I had taken for a snowflake...

Comments

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Wow - impressive, thanks for linking back to that. Loved the waterwheel in particular. Great idea (looks furtively at house walls which are cream and considers stealing work's overhead projector).

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Yes, I particularly liked the waterwheel.

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

::squees for Durham photos::

I miss the familiarity of Durham. I knew exactly where that photo was taken on Silver Street before I saw the caption. :-(

Though it's telling that I never made a Durham icon.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Heh. Well, I don't have a Durham icon either...

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing - we read about the event and wished that we'd been in the country and able to pay a visit.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Goodness, would you have come all this way? That would have been fun - and I'd have loved to hear your reactions. Well, apparently they're doing it again in two years time - make a date!

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

I can't guaranteed we'd have made it, but we've never been to Durham and it sounds like just the sort of thing we'd like. Of course, being geographically challenged I have very little idea of where Durham is, other than being north of here, but I figure it's not as north as Scotland, so how far can it be :-)
Speaking as someone who just went all the way to Delhi to mooch around historic sites and hang out with a friend...

Lumiere

[(Anonymous)]

I could spend only half an hour there on Thurs so it's great to see this excellent record. Thanks!
Bob the Bolder

Re: Lumiere

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Ah, I wondered why we had so few pictures from you.

Thanks for the linkback.

There's also a Durham Lumiere Flickr group (http://www.flickr.com/groups/1253876@N21/) with some interesting photos - including some from the Botanic Gardens.