This year’s Light Up Poole festival of digital light art is reaching out to the wider community through an expanded programme of creative engagement projects.
For three nights from 20 to 22 February the town’s Quay, Old Town and High Street will be transformed after dark by digital light art, much of it newly commissioned, that addresses diversity in terms of age, faith, social exclusion and migration in response to the theme “Spectrum.”
Created by Poole-based lighting designer James Smith, The People’s Chandelier at the Fish Shambles on Poole Quay is a sculptural installation sponsored by NFU Mutual Wessex in which members of the public are invited to fill jars with spectrum coloured water and place them on the frame with light inside to produce endless, ever-changing combinations of light and colour in the darkness.
“As a local business NFU Mutual Wessex is delighted to be working with Light Up Poole on one of the centrepieces of this year’s community engagement programme,” says Simon Godding, Agent at the Wareham office of NFU Mutual Wessex. “The People’s Chandelier is an amazing opportunity for the people of Poole and beyond to contribute to public art in the making at the Fish Shambles, the historic beating heart of the town’s fishing industry.”
Siemens Mobility has been working with local schools on a project based on the traffic signals and controllers it makes at its Poole factory, while Lighthouse writer-in-residence Jack Thacker is working with Wave Arts Education Agency is hosting poetry workshops this month with primary school children to create work that celebrates the migration pattern of the osprey.
The poems will be shown during the festival at the Quayside HQ of birds of Poole Harbour, the conservation charity that is leading an osprey translocation project to restore a breeding population of ospreys in the south of England, while artist Michael Condron is using its work to create a sculpture of an osprey to be bathed in light and installed an Poole Quay.
Lighthouse, Poole’s centre for the arts, is to host a series of talks supporting the Light Up Poole programme with speakers including TV historian Dr Janina Ramirez; Professor Mark McCaughrean, Senior Science Advisor at the European Space Agency; medieval history expert Professor Giles Gaspar from Durham University; Bournemouth-based lighting designer Michael Grubb on telling stories with light; Cressida Granger, MD of Mathmos and researchers from Oxford University’s Diseases of Modern Life Group compare how the Victorians coped with the impact of new technology with how we deal with it today.
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