Shine a small light

[shewhomust]

This is the weekend when Durham hosts the Lumiere festival of lights: my reactions to this are always pretty mixed, and this year, on the tail-end of a cold, I didn't plan any major excursions. Nonetheless, by the end of Friday, with letters to post, we wandered down to the priority postbox under the viaduct, ready to combine our errand with viewing the two installations in easy reach of home.

The flavour of the whole operation is best summed up by the fact that the priority postbox, the one with a late collection, was closed. No explanation, so this may or may not have been Lumiere related, and no suggestion where to find the nearest / best alternative: just a "not in service" sign blocking the slot. We carried our letters around with us while we searched for illumination, then durham_rambler drove up to the sorting office while I made dinner. No harm done, but a note struck.

The next bum note was self-inflicted: I had seen a piece in the local paper about the artwork under the viaduct, and thought oh, that's very similar to something they've done in the past..., when I should have thought they are using an old photograph, that's not how it will look. Which is why we spent some time waiting for the display to start, and for lights to appear. Never mind, the viaduct itself is well worth admiring:

This is just a Durham streetscape at dusk: as a backdrop, it's quite a challenge to the artist. To reach 'Limina', carry on to the end of the street and turn right, where there's an open space under the arch. Someone has erected a screen smeared with light - and someone else has provided the small children which are an essential part of the display:

The Lumiere website explains:

The ever changing reflective surfaces of light and water are used to create a mesmerising, liminal space for visitors to explore. In the arch of the Viaduct, a black monolith is brought to life in the dark, and as the visitor approaches, ephemeral patterns are activated creating a moving light painting...

Maybe this interplay of light and water would have worked better within sight of the river?

Well, never mind, on to Redhills, where Tim Etchells' 'Shifting Ground' gets Brownie points from me for being a genuinely site-specific piece - and loses them for consisting of giant neon letters. Maybe the first artist to use this medium was doing something creative and striking, but by now I have seen all too many neon slogans, and I'm bored now. Arriving to see the two words SHIFTING and GROUND across the top of the frontage in large red letters, I just thought, Oh, one of those. Yes, those words were chosen for this building, but so what?

Specially commissioned and created for the exterior facade of Redhills, the former headquarters of the Durham Miners and the Pitman's Parliament, Tim Etchells' new work invites the viewer to consider both literal and metaphorical meanings of the simple phrase. In the first case, Shifting Ground is the hard and dangerous work of mining itself, the movement of stone and materials under the surface of the earth. In the second, Shifting Ground refers to a treacherous landscape, a situation of danger and instability.

Well, that's very profound. Of course, this is visual art, but it was beyond my skills to photograph the dimly lit building and the bright text in one image. Two additional factors increased this sense of anticlimax. One was that the website apparently promised some sort of animation or audio (I didn't see that, and it has now been edited). The other is that in 2017 Redhills was the cancas for The Common Good, one of the highlights of that year's festival - not, as Friday's visitors remembered it, 'the NHS piece' but a much wider eulogy of public service:

Two minor installations from what Lumiere has to offer, and it's not too late to go out and see more, but I don't think we will. (It is too late, and has been for least a week, to get tickets for the city centre.)

Comments

[cmcmck]

Can't imagine that's the most peaceful of streets with the trains rolling over but then in our last abode, we lived on top of the railway tunnel and you'd only notice when something _didn't_ run!

[shewhomust]

- and it's not as if you could move in without realising how close you were to the line!

[sovay]

Someone has erected a screen smeared with light - and someone else has provided the small children which are an essential part of the display

They do look like they're conjuring.

[shewhomust]

They do!