e-Luminating Cambridge with Pearce Hire
- Details
The 2017 e-Luminate Cambridge Festival celebrated its fifth edition and during the past five years has become a key highlight in the city’s cultural calendar. The festival, which ran for 35 hours across six nights, commemorated the diversity and rich architectural offerings of this historic city – with ‘light’ as the star of the show.
Cambridge Live, the organisers of e-Luminate, which is recognised as a contemporary arts festival, approached Pearce Hire as their trusted technical production partner to work with the latest creative lighting fixtures to produce stunning architectural lighting illuminations at several venues around the city.
As the organisers explain, “Light seamlessly crosses both Art and Science, and the e-Luminate Cambridge Festival is a celebration of the infinite possibilities created by this intersection.”
Throughout the festival, there were several architectural lighting installations for visitors to enjoy, as well as various activities, talks and concerts, all using the city’s architectural heritage as the backdrop. The aim of the festival is to explore the expanding area of artistic practice known as ‘Light Art’.
“The concepts this festival encapsulates underpins a key element of our day-to-day work – that of creating atmosphere for events through light installations,” observes Shaun Pearce, MD, Pearce Hire. “Except that with e-Luminate, ‘light’ really was the focus of the event (pardon the pun!). So, when we were approached to sponsor the festival, the team jumped at the chance to showcase lighting. Working closely with the organisers and architectural lighting manufacturers and designers, we were able to demonstrate what architectural and feature lighting can do to help evoke different atmospheres and reactions from audiences who may ordinarily only be subliminally impacted by the lighting of the event they are attending.”
The e-Luminate Cambridge Festival promotes itself as a low-carbon footprint event and so naturally the lighting needed to be environmentally sound, and reflect the very latest advances in lighting technology. As such, the lighting fixtures used by Pearce Hire lighting included several LED fixtures – all ensuring low emission and low power consumption. These included the Chauvet COLARado – an IP66-rated LED wash; the I-Pix BB4 LED washlight, which is good for large-scale lighting installations; SGM P-5 LED – a full colour LED washlight; in addition to the Robe Pointe – a bright, super-fast fixture.
Pearce Hire also provided a sample of their award-winning temporary power distribution and power supply for the venues – including a 25Kva road tow generator for County Hall and power distribution systems for other installations they supplied.
Alessandra Caggiano, Artistic Director for the e-Luminate Cambridge Festival explains, “Our mission at Cambridge Live is to offer shared live cultural experiences that everyone can be a part of; e-Luminate Cambridge Festival encapsulates this as well as an inclusiveness for all residents and visitors to the city.
“Working with Pearce Hire for the e-Luminate Cambridge Festival was literally an illuminating experience. Shaun and his team went the extra mile to provide great solutions for the several sites they worked on and in particular excelled in the technical illumination of Shire Hall ‘Rainbow’ installation. Colour, movement and a range of changing patterns made this piece truly one-of-a-kind.”
(Jim Evans)
