Southover Grange Gardens
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Salt
Poem by Heather Shann
Lewes Poet Heather performs her work in collaboration with her partner Laurence accompanied by lighting from Karen Van Creveld, Graham Festenstein and Eleni Shiarlis.
Life grows, enclosed by a salt water sanctuary. A feeling of being held within something bigger than ourselves, immersed in the ocean.
Three connected haiku poems explore how water nourishes life, relating the deep nurture and safety of the womb to the image of the sea as a mother – holding life.
I am drawn to the idea of water as ‘home’ – a life moving and changing within the womb, and the abundance of life housed by the sea. I also personally feel pulled time and again to the ocean - a sense of returning home.
There is beauty in sea swimming, as the rise and fall of waves echoes through our bodies. In response to the cycles of the moon, I wanted to explore the sounds of the sea and the sounds in the womb – the parallel rhythms of the tide and a beating heart.
I am intrigued by ideas around the moon connecting cyclically to both human life and the sea, influencing the swell of fertility and the tide.
A pregnant woman is treated with reverence and care, her pregnancy is an honoured and sacred time - a rounded life protected and guarded. Emerging now is an awakening consciousness around our human impact on the ocean and indeed our planet. A return to a wisdom and respect for the sea – for its power, energy and necessity.
For millennia water has been used symbolically in rituals, used therapeutically for health and healing and used to inspire creative responses. Safe and clean water sustains life. It connects us across continents. With this shared resource comes shared responsibility.
Heather Shann began writing poetry last year, drawing inspiration from the natural world. She hopes to stimulate an awakening and call to action in light of the current climate crisis. Heather is drawn to small detail and attempts to capture something of what she observes through her writing. Heather teaches part time in a special needs school and works part time for an arts charity. She loves to sing and is also involved in a performance as part of Brighton Fringe this year.
Special thanks go to Laurence Shann for playing bass in this piece and editing the recording.
Glittering stars
The Oyster Project with Hannah Hill
Award-winning community action by people with and without disabilities. We support three weekly groups, well-being, drama, art and an annual family camp; the work of Radio Lewes was also founded by Oyster members.
The Oyster Project was founded in 2004 by John Russell and became a registered charity in 2009 receiving the Queen's Award for Voluntary Service in 2014.
Light Fish
Tim Minter
Light fish is a series of streams of light, activated by the audience, creating an installation that moves swiftly through the urgent river. The aesthetic beauty of the light refracted in the flowing water is reminiscent of bioluminescence. The unstoppable water is a force pulling the sculpture, and thus the light, along with it.
Tim Minter is a Brighton based electronic artist working at the intersection of whimsical art and product design. He designs and hand builds one off and short run pieces often based around light and motion. He finds beauty in the connected world, the data it generates and attempts to harness that, show it, and react to it, in his pieces.
Inevitably the connected world means the world of social media and the focus of much of his work is consuming and reacting to social media, either en-mass or at an intimate individual level.
Many pieces combine art and product design and their external simplicity can bely the mechanical, electronic and programming complexity.
Lunar Cycle
Eleni Shiarlis
Inspired by the lunar phases of the moon, this lighting installation is a representation of the simplicity and connection between the moon and the tides. Struck by the beauty of the reflection of the moon in the water, the movement and energy of these lunar phases, and how these phases mirror our own human energies in life and in creative design processes.
Each month the moon moves through eight phases and these gradual but significant changes are represented through careful incrementations in the lighting of the circles: New Moon (1% light); Waxing Crescent (25% light); First Quarter (50% light); Waxing Gibbous (75% light); Full Moon (100% light); Waning Gibbous (75% light); Last Quarter (50% light); Waning Crescent (25% light). This gradual phasing of light can be seen beautifully shimmering through the water of the Winterbourne Stream.
The Lunar Cycles offers a simple reminder of our connection between the planet we live on, the powerful energy of our seas, and to the wider universe beyond.
Technical specifications:
Made from recycled bicycle wheels,
LED IP67 VarioLED Flex VENUS Colour Blue
IP65 Single colour cool white 4000K LED Tape
Powered by drivers, and controls by mode lighting.
Music: Roman Flügel
The Team:
Eleni Shiarlis Lighting (Designer)
LED Linear (Blue Neon Flux)
Select Electrical (White LED tape)
Mode Lighting (Control System)
South Coast Bikes (Recycled wheels)
T. Reeve & Son Ltd (Wheel sprayed)
Gabrielle Minkley-Barnes (Project Manager)
"Light festivals are a particular passion of Eleni's. Light can be an incredibly creative medium, and Light Festivals throughout the world and are a great source of inspiration for Eleni and her work, offering an experimental playground to see how far lighting design can be taken"
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Lunar Landings
Shadow Cabinet & Children from Manor Green College
This short film is the outcome of a workshop undertaken at the Manor Green School in Crawley.
Working with the children from Manor Green School, Shadow Cabinet created a performance that was recorded and projected as part of the schools Winter Lights celebration at the end of 2019.
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The workshop was undertaken with collaborations from lighting designer Margareth Sunjoto and Manor Green College Head of Art, Vanessa Dell.
The film was produced by Michael Hawksworth. Mick is a senior lecturer at the University of Brighton School of Art a graphic designer and film-maker. He has made art documentaries for broadcast television as well as working in community arts and education projects.
Charlotte Oliver and Hannah Hill, the creators of Shadow Cabinet Puppetry met at the Brighton School of Puppetry and are based in East Sussex.Their rich backgrounds in puppetry, art, performance, music and workshop leading combine to bring you exciting and beautiful shadow puppet shows and puppet making workshops for people of all ages, including people with disabilities.
Wonder
“Tak kenal maka tak sayang” (Out of sight, out of mind) – Indonesian Proverb
Margareth Sunjoto
Wonder is a light installation inspired by the moon landing. It was wonder that led humanity to embark on their voyages of explorations and discovery. First, we traverse across oceans and continents, from pole to pole, then head for the skies and finally at one moment of history we set our minds to the space beyond the bounds of this very planet. To discover and be enthralled by wonder has always been our innermost drive, never merely for purely pragmatic or economic gain such as to extract and exploit newfound resources. Wonder led us to land on the moon in 1969.
Today we are faced with one environmental catastrophe over another, perhaps unprecedented in our history. Climate change, natural disasters, mass extinctions have often followed our explorations. It seems that humanity forgot that every uncovering of the unknown not only yielded resources to be exploited, but also foreign, fragile wonders of a world previously untampered by human touch. Desire to exploit has taken over and perhaps taken away our sense of wonder. In this day and age, greed has often replaced wonder in our exploration of discoveries.
It has been 50 years since we visited the moon, and as this memory slowly withers away, we are in jeopardy of losing our sense of wonder as well, replaced by desires to soothe our fear of running out of resources. In many cases of explorations, as we forgot the sense of wonder, we forgot as well to preserve and protect the beauty and wonder we had discovered in the first place. Humanity is not only capable of survival, but also is capable, or responsible, to be more precise, to help the wonders they discover flourish.
This installation wishes to depict a childlike wonder of the moon and space, the journey into the boundless space. Children see moon exploration with a sense of wonder, not greed. That wonder is our hope; we hope for a future generation of explorers that ventures not to exploit, but to protect and preserve their discoveries, out of sense of wonder.
Wonder was develop alongside an installation at Manor Green College, Crawley as a part of the school’s Winterlights Festival 2019, in collaboration with Shadow Cabinet Puppetry.
Coming from Indonesia where the sun shines brightly through the year, Margareth has always been always fascinated how light and shadow shapes architecture. She took a Masters in Light & Lighting at the Bartlett University College London and since joining Studio 29, Margareth has worked on a wide range of projects, including multiple lighting installation that have been shortlisted for Lighting Awards. Margareth returns to LewesLight for the third time.
Studio 29 is a leading lighting design consultancy with a list of clientele that includes The Crown Estate, Soho Estates, Shaftesbury Estates and Portman Estates. The practice is responsible for numerous interior and exterior lighting schemes throughout central London including Regent Street, St James’s Market, Ilona Rose House, St Martin’s Courtyard and Spitalfields.
- Lighting Designer: Margareth Sunjoto, Studio 29
- Design Assistant: Charlie Magee Wood, Rose Budford College
- Sound: Jon Meacock
- Shadow puppet workshop at Manor Green College lead by Hannah Hill & Charlotte Oliver, Shadow Cabinet Puppetry
- For Manor Green College - Vanessa Dell
- Lighting Equipment : Commercial Lighting Systems
- Choral soundtrack provided by The Paddock Singers, directed by Ruth Kerr, performing The Seal Lullaby by Eric Whitacre
"The Paddock Singers is a women's chamber choir based in Lewes, directed by Ruth Kerr. We perform an eclectic mix of repertoire to a high standard, with an emphasis very much on the enjoyment and celebration of music. Recent performances have included a semi-staged arrangement of Gluck's opera Orfeo, a sell-out concert of songs by women composers and songwriters, and a "gig" in which we were backing singers for a soul music band! This is our second collaboration with Lewes Light, and it's great to be involved again with such an innovative and memorable creative event in our home town.
Migration
Arjun Mistry
‘Migration’ reflects on the symbiotic network of animal rituals and celestial cycles that altogether create our thriving ecosystem.
Did you know fish pay attention to the moon? By seeking out shallower waters, salmon have been shown to use the moon as a lodestar to aid navigation. Elsewhere, for birds, the first full moon becomes a signal for Autumn migration. The moonlight offers birds one last opportunity to catch fish in a feeding frenzy that lasts just one night. In turn, local fishermen have learnt to synchronise their habits to take advantage of the heightened activity.
Animal migration is one pattern in nature that builds into a dense, interlocking balancing act that is our ecosystem. Always in a state of adaption, natural ecosystems are constantly evolving to exist within the increasing presence of our man-made environments. No change happens in isolation. Even the smallest adaptions in our own patterns of behaviour, for better or worse, do send ripples of change throughout our wider ecosystem.
Arjun Mistry is a lighting designer and student at UCL. He takes inspiration from nature, the great architects of the 21st century and most importantly his hometown Crawley.
