A DRAMATIC lighting installation will create a blaze of colour on the windswept hill of Tulla for Culture Night this Friday.
Locally-based artist Tim Humphries is the mastermind behind the LightsUP installation, which will be live-streamed on Tulla Tidy Towns Facebook page and on culturenight.ie, from 8-9pm. It will involve random LED lights illuminating the high crosses in the graveyard and creating what Tim describes as “a connection between heavens and earth”.
“I’ve been working with light installations for over 20 years,” Tim explained. “For one of those, I projected light onto the outside of the old Carlton Cinema building in Limerick. In others, for the EVA International, I would have created words through light in public places.”
This time, there are no words involved, but a dramatic illumination of Tulla graveyard’s striking high crosses. “I have been transfixed by the location,” Tim said. “I have put in around 30 LED lights and will have six or seven LED torches which will shoot beams of light up into the sky. There is a spiritual theme, something similar to the illumination every year in New York to commemorate 9/11.”
In addition to the live installation, Tim will also document the event in photographs, which will be posted to the Tulla Tidy Towns Facebook page. “I’m involved with Tidy Towns, so they have agreed to host the livestream for me, as well as the pictures of the installation, which I think will convey the process. If people are watching live on Culture Night, I’d ask them to bear with me because the screen will be black at first, before the lighting slowly builds up.”
Meanwhile, East Clare audiences will be also be treated to a Mountshannon Miscellany with an evening of spoken word live online from the lakeside village, from 8pm.
Music will come from a wealth of local talent, including Victoria Claire, Gaelynn Lea, Jyoshna and Denise Glass, Terence O’Reilly, Ruth Smith, Fergal Scahill, Fin and Cian and Cathal Maloney.
The Culture Night event follows on from a very successful virtual arts festival in Mountshannon. When the annual event had to be largely called off, festival organisers used all of their ingenuity to move as many acts as possible to radio and online channels.
Taking ‘Identity’ as its theme for 2020, the festival will live-stream some of the responses for Culture Night on the Facebook page of Mountshannon Arts Festival. Responses in poetry and prose will coem from Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, Owodunni Mustapha, Insaf Yalcinkaya, Eavan Brennan, Patsy Donnellan, Pearse O’Shiel and Victoria Claire.
After the success of the virtual festival, organisers took the opportunity to explore the theme further, putting a call out for prose poetry and artwork focusing on identity.
Responses will be shared on mountshannonarts.net and on social media pages. Contributions will have been filmed and recorded and will be interspersed with live music.
“With everything so uncertain, it is hard to make plans, but perhaps there has never been a time in our lives, when it has been so important to continue to find ways of creating and sharing art in all of its various manifestations,” organisers said.