#384: Scattered Light
Shadows — the highlight of my Lumiere
I’ll be honest, I think there have been better Lumieres than this year’s — Lumiere being Durham’s biennial light show across the city, and as of this year, across the county. The cuckoos of 2017 remain my favourite, although I am also a fan of the now-permanent only you can write the next page. This year was my third Lumiere, so maybe I had high expectations, but there was one piece that stood out: Scattered Light by Jim Campbell.
I nearly missed the full glory of this piece, and I wasn’t the only one. At first glace, it looked to be simply a wall of flickering lights. Very pretty lights, I must say, bringing a warm glow to the chill of a winter evening in the north, but seemingly just a collection of simple lights nonetheless.
That was what I thought, when I first saw it from a distance walking down the majestic Mary’s College driveway, and I continued to think that as I came to a stop and looked at one end of it. But I am so glad that I decided to walk around and view it from another perspective, to step back far enough to see that the lights were not flickering randomly — they were creating what I can only describe as shadows. Where the lights flicked off, figures appeared, running across the wall of lights, as though rushing to a lecture down the hill or heading home after a long day’s walk.
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Watch a clip of Scattered Light here.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CWtId4Wlcnv/
I was delighted with this piece, and stood there gazing at it, watching the shadows walking in different places and at different speeds. And then I wondered: does it work with my glasses off? The answer: yes, even better than with them on. Being short sighted, when I took my glasses off the little lights became larger fuzzy balls of glowing yellow light, while the figures of shadow continued to walk across them. By the time I decided to put my glasses back on, it was no longer so impressive — for once, it was a positive not being able to see clearly from a distance.
Perhaps my joy was increased after a less eventful wander around the other lumiere sights (although the Castle poetry and Halo were also favourites of mine). Maybe I was tired after all that hill walking in Durham. But I remain glad that we stopped to see Scattered Light, our last Lumiere sight of the evening. This piece allowed me to pretend I was staring at a beautiful galaxy of lights, while also enjoying the magic of the illusion of shadow figures walking in the stars. My only wish was that I could walk among them.
