They say you cannot go back. They ask if I would ever move back north. My answer is ‘no’, because I believe the ones who say you cannot go back. I left the North-East a long time ago. I have lived virtually all of my adult life in East Anglia. This is now ‘home’ in the deepest sense of the word. But I believe that while you "cannot go back" you really must revisit. We cannot go back in time, but we can go back to places. Perhaps it is important that we do. To reconnect with the people and places (not just family, but the kinship of our birth places, the ancestors if you will) who
may or may not have made us who we are, but who most definitely laid out the original framework that we had to work with, and the wider templates that we started working from. An important part of our self-connection work rests in understanding our current relationship with those places and their people.
Perhaps they will call us back.
Perhaps they will make us even more grateful to be where we are now.
We will only know if we ask.
This is the first of a two-part reflection on a recent trip back to the area that was once home.
The inciting incident for this particular trip was my brother mentioning the Lumiere festival, and my immediate response of "Let's do it, I'll come up."
A bit of background to the event: The first Lumiere took place in Durham in 2009 when 22 light installations were dotted around the city. It was originally planned as a one-off event but made such an impact that with the support of Durham County Council, Durham University and other sponsors, it has since become a free-to-attend, biennial event. Checkout the website About- Lumiere | Light Art Festival | November 2023 (lumiere-festival.com) to make your own mind up about its purpose, eco-impact, skills & creativity legacy and all the rest. It is easy to question the value of art – especially this kind of art – but dig a little deeper and maybe you’ll come out in favour.
If not – then just go one year – and experience the joy of it – and then you will. I hope.
I hope that you will, because I want this amazing festival to continue, and I want to be there next time around.
Surely that is the best endorsement one can give to an event.
Or perhaps a better endorsement would be to tell you that I lay awake half the night with images from it replaying in my head and a daft smile on my face. Or to tell you how excited I feel when I tell people how brilliant it was.
And we didn’t even see it all! To write up my recollections of it, I have revisited the map and the programme and caught sight of all the things we missed. I could argue that we caught the best of it, but because of the things we 'nearly' missed, I can't guarantee that.
By the time you read this, the 2023 event will have closed, and planning for 2025 (I trust) is under way. That said: the artworks are a mixture of installations specially commissioned for the Durham Lumiere (and I don't know what happens to them afterwards) and installations created by world-renowned artists that will no doubt be on tours of their own, that you may catch elsewhere in the world...if you do, I'd love to know about it!
The Durham Lumiere event is free for all to attend, but the early evening (4:30 to 7:30) is ticketed…purely to control numbers and ease congestion in the mediaeval city streets. With no need to be there particularly early – our plan was to show up just outside of that window – and to see as much as we could by taking as logical a route as we could. I have no idea how much of the plan came together…I handed the map back to my brother and let him lead the way where we had free choice.
In the very central area, there is a self-evident route that is largely crowd-controlled, and in places "funnelled". I know how horrible that sounds, but it wasn’t. It worked. There are natural bottle-necks at the bridges, and bag-searches were slowing things a little more, but in terms of safety and to be honest creating a little space in the crowd, it worked well.
There’d been a few interesting moments early on. We failed to find the first of the Emotional Weather pieces despite climbing up to the Railway Station and getting a little excited at a distant blue light that turned out to be a timetable announcement board. And we were a little under-whelmed when we found the next one by the Bus Station.
But then I loved Chila Burman’s joyful take on the Market Place – maybe the central tiger spoke to me so much because I only recently saw the theatre interpretation of Life of PI, and this white-striped character proudly marching among the people reminded me of Richard Parker. I didn’t hunt out the details if any were given, because I was already just trying to capture the bits that I knew I wanted to hold in mind and wanting to simply spend time in the company of these thousands of people who were holding a kind of collective joy.
Meanwhile the walls were dotted with all the bright colours that Hindus love (and so do we). It would be easy to call it kitsch, but why not? Animals and gods and symbols...or pretty pictures, depending on your take.
We were lucky with the weather. A wet week had given way to a drying day. The temperature gauge said 4 degrees, but with so many bodies and so much light and laughter, it felt warmer.
It would be much later in the night, as we came over Prebends Bridge, that I would understand our progress as a pilgrimage, as a reminder that such journeys were not meant to be solemn and hard, they were meant to be joyful. It is only in later centuries that we have lost sight of the purpose of faith. It is only in these later lives that we have lost our ability to recognise that the point of the journey is the moments along the way, the connection not with the saints but with each other, with humanity (in every sense of that word) and communing and communicating (as the bases of community).
Before that, yielding to my stated desire to see the Cathedral area, we joined the throng. We followed the crowd winding its way up to the Palace Green. And Wow! I said. Hogwarts, was my brother’s response. I cannot tell you how long it took that crowd to slowly meander through the winding channels to the Sanctuary knocker on the Cathedral door. I can only tell you that I was entranced the entire time. Javier Riera, I salute you!
What the website programme says about the piece “Liquid Geometry” is this...
“A monochromatic immersive experience of monumental proportions.
A series of three-dimensional projections will magically transform the famous architecture of Durham’s UNESCO World Heritage Site into an immersive display of mind-bending and meditative geometric shapes. Spanish artist Javier Riera plays with and echoes the structure of the Cathedral and surrounding Durham University buildings on Palace Green, seeking out the hidden qualities and dimensions of familiar facades and transforming them with dynamic patterns and shapes.”
Yes. Yes. And yes!
Seriously! I think my most repeated phrase was “Oh my god, that is so clever.” It wasn’t just clever, it was beautiful, and yes it was mind-bending. Purely by the use of white light and dark shadow, the projection changed the shape of familiar buildings: they appeared to move, expand, contract, shape shift. Flat surfaces became curved. They acquired new 3-dimensional shapes, different to the ones I knew they had. Angles and curves playing with each other…making the brain re-evaluate what it thought it knew. That would be a theme that would come back into play during the evening – one that teased and played with the edges of certainty.
Eventually, we passed through the great doors and wound our way into the knave of the Cathedral
under the Pulse Topology net of over four thousand bulbs, simple white lights on simple pendant wires. I don’t understand the technology, but I watched as individuals held their palms under a ‘reader’ or ‘recorder’ and – according to the official line the lights are “activated by the heartbeat of the participants. When a new participant interacts with the installation, their pulse is added to the canopy of recordings above them, contributing to a glimmering, connective array through which audiences are invited to walk.”
Whenever someone new put their palm into the mix, a different wave of energy could be seen to flow through the array.
Even without this deeper meaning it was a beautiful sight. And with it, thinking about it afterwards, I feel that the great Cathedral space is exactly where this should be shown – not just this cathedral,
but all of them, and the temples and the mosques and the open groves..oh, I wonder how this might work in a woodland space, if that could be made to happen.
“Light Art” is by its nature transitory, but it has got me thinking about all art – even the fixed paintings and sculptures of the ‘old masters’ – all of it is informed by its surroundings and by the viewing experience of individuals and crowds. It occurs to me that each haphazard gathering of people in front of an artwork for however short or long a time is a temporary community of a kind, sharing an experience that is in part created by the sharing of it, the time, the temperature, the mood of the people and on and on. In that sense all art is transitory – it only means what it means on any given day.
And sometimes that experience is deeply affected by the setting. It was here. There was a sense of wonder, and a collective, literal, looking up, looking around, with the kind of awe that the original Cathedral would have instilled. It is a reminder that it is not the lights that matter, not the stones and windows and monuments that matter, it is that collective sense of awe, of wonder.
A lot is spoken and written about how short a time people generally linger in front of an artwork, even the most famous of them, the ones they have actually come to see. A few seconds generally. Rarely more than a few minutes.
That misses the point. The point is that we can be changed in a heartbeat. The pictures that resurface in our thoughts and dreams may not be the ones we sat in front of for an hour. They may be the ones we simply walked through, looking up, looking around, listening to the people around us, feeling their heartbeats alongside our own – even without the aid of technology.
If all of this made me want to revisit the Cathedral again in its everyday, work-a-day clothes, which it did, then I’m sure her custodians would be pleased. I wanted to look at the words that linger here outside of exhibition times. I wanted to light a candle that I could do at any time. I wanted to look at other sculptures that have found a home here. It's been a long time since I was in Durham Cathedral...it is time I was again. Alone. For no reason other than the call of being in a sacred space that I didn't know I might have been missing.
By this stage in our wander around Durham, I am already delighted. If I had been told I had to go home then and see no more, I would not have complained. It was already worth the trip.
But we continued.
Frelin’s Inner Cloister was a piece that made more sense once explained. But even afterwards, I am not sure what to make of Ai Weiwei’s Illuminated Bottle Rack. It did not speak to me. Similarly Yinka Ilori’s In Plants We Trust did not seem to be getting its message across…it became a simple light tunnel, a selfie-shot opportunity for most people. We talked about the spectrum and the missing strands. Meanwhile the Diamond Garden was more about involving the local school kids in its creation, educating them about their local coal heritage and the changing face of energy production, while bringing forth their creative abilities.
All of this makes me ponder (for the umpteenth time) about how to use programmes and guidebooks. Do we read them before we go? I try not to, because they can create preconceptions. Do we use them on-site? Can sometimes be tricky. Afterwards? This is my default setting, but it always leaves me wishing there was at least one thing I’d known in advance. I’m coming to the conclusion that the purpose of guidebooks is to make you want to go back.
Thence onto the slow walk along the South Bailey…another natural bottleneck as we head down
to the river. Illuminated this time by Pitaya’s Planetoïds. This was another favourite of mine, another that had me saying Oh, that’s so clever…No photograph of this exhibit will capture it. Any photographic image with reduce the discs to their near-two-dimensional selves. Flat discs, slightly bevelled and cut-out to create shapes and shadows, but quite thin, hang in the vertical plane. They are surrounded by cords of what I will call light-strings (because I’m not an electrician!) – you know the kind of thing, a long strand, with light seeming to pulsate along it (by virtue of quick on/off sequences – that much I do get). The fascination with the piece though, is the way your brain fills in the gaps.
These flat discs, even once you’ve worked out they are, basically, flat – look like spheres. So much of “light art” plays with what we see and what we think we see. It teases our brain to question how much we can trust our own senses. I might get a bit freaked out by that if I thought about it too much, so I don’t. I choose to just take delight in the fact that I can be fooled. It’s modern stage magic.
Of course, it helps that it is also intrinsically beautiful.
By this stage I am also thinking about the use of art in calming people. At various stages in this walk around the city we have been in “crowd” – but there has been very little impatience, and no
complaining. A few people have decided to opt out and take a different route – and a one point I also considered whether we might do likewise – but then there was forward motion again, and I let the idea go, we’d continue on.
So we did. Down onto that bridge where I got the sense (belatedly) of pilgrimage. The lightscape here was a dance of the kind of spotlights you imagine searching for WW2 bombers, or beaming the Bat Signal onto the clouds. It was back-lit by a soundscape of extractions from local community choirs. I won’t pretend to fully follow what the light & sound artists had in mind, but on a personal level it took me back to the idea of Gregorian Chant – something I would love to have heard in the cloisters accompanying that simple light sculpture of Frelin’s.
Sometimes you step out of time. For a few seconds on that bridge I did. I was hearing stewards tell me to be careful of my footing, so I was looking down at a kaleidoscope of torch beams, I was
occasionally looking up at the search lights (and yes, thinking Bat Man!), I was hearing sacred music in one of the oldest cathedral cities in the country. It all merged.
Then back along the river – not quite catching the point of some installations – which meant
not catching them at their point, I now realise. But we did get the search lights transforming Prebends from an old stone bridge into a modern suspension bridge. Suspension of disbelief.
Back to where we came in...to take a different route… time was moving on and I thought I had
seen everything I really wanted to see, so even more happy to just agree with whatever suggestion my guiding brother came up with. Big Brother – thank you, sir – awesome job.
Without him wandering off, and me following, I would not have come across another of my
favourite pieces of the night: Colourful Chaos – Emma Allen’s absolutely cute, silly, playful, joyful piece that involves a pair of teddy-bears scrambling up the façade of the Masonic Hall, paint-balling each other as they go, up onto the roof to scribble their colourful flowers and rainbows before squabbling their way back down again and in through the ground-floor windows. INSPIRED! We watched it two or three times, and overheard another adult saying, “I could stand here and watch this all night.” Anything that brings us back to our inner child is a good thing. Thank you, Emma!
I will smile every time I remember that.
Our last two pieces of the evening were Angela Sandwith’s Ghost Nest, which is one of those pieces that is merely beautiful until you understand it and then it becomes also powerful. Discarded fishing gear and other materials collected from the Durham beaches. I have a default setting that art should not need to be explained…I’m questioning that now. Sometimes, maybe, we do need the back-story.
This is a small and poignant piece. I don’t know what it’s future is, but I would hope it will find a permanent home maybe in the Cathedral, or one of the parish churches close to where that detritus came from. It is not the most stunning piece on display, but it may be one of the most important ones.
And then we made our way to Joanie Lemercier’s Constellations. Even if it hadn’t been getting so late, I think this is the one I would have chosen to finish on. If you get the chance to see this performed, ignore the still image – it gives you no idea at all - go see it. I would happily have missed it on the basis of the promo picture, but at the risk of sounding like a teenager, all I can say is, honestly, like, Wow!
Make no mistake this is not ‘an installation’, it is an audio-visual performance, a son-et-lumiere spectacular. The W-word did escape my lips several times. Several times we thought it was drawing to a close, but it burst into new life. Mostly we stood in silence. Lucky to have got there late in the evening when the crowds had gone…able to stand with an unimpeded view and be drawn into the depths of the cosmos. Shape-shifting light, black holes, exploding stars, constellations, geometric shapes, all dancing in light projected onto a wall of water. I do not have the words to convey just how touching, brilliant, inspiring, silencing, intriguing, deeply moving, this piece is.
I came away wishing I lived closer, because I think I would have hopped on a bus every night of the festival to seek out the ones I missed, and to revisit the ones I loved. In particular, I would always want to finish with Lemercier’s universe. When Tony asked if I wanted to see any more, or call it a day… calling it a day was the only sensible response. Lemercier had provided the finale.
Just on the vague off-chance that it doesn’t come across, I am deeply grateful to my brother for suggesting we go, for leading me around and letting me not think but just enjoy, (and incidentally to my sis-in-law, who cooked and waited dinner until nearly midnight when we made it back to theirs!).
Also to everyone involved in putting Lumiere Durham together and making it work.
And, in advance, to everyone who is going to put up with me rattling on about it for the next few weeks! On a not great day, a few days back, I wrote in my journal that I needed to be uplifted,
inspired. Seek and ye shall find, ask and it shall be given!
All being well, I will be back for the next one, probably with a plan to take more time over it. Go more than once, take it more slowly. Revisit the best bits. There’s a whole host of stuff we didn’t get around to, which is kind of a shame and kind of doesn’t matter at all. It was an utterly brilliant evening.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
