#130: The Illuminated Dome
Exploring Durham’s Lumiere
Light. A universal symbol for hope in the darkness. Something that filled pumpkins at Halloween, our skies on Bonfire Night, and will fill our houses this Christmas.
Light has taken over Durham these last few days at its Lumiere festival. But this is not just any light. This is light as art. Light controlled and worked as a medium. Light that speaks.
This isn’t just light as a vague representation of hope or clarity, but light in the shape of a moon surveying the city, light interacting with people and sound, light transformed into something greater than universal symbol.
In Durham’s market square stood Dome and Arches by Luminarie de Cagna. Beside historic buildings, overlooked by the cathedral, this dome of tens of thousands of LED lights shone like an archway into a fairytale.
This is light as architecture. The usually intangible entity as a physical, explorable structure. One to walk through and be surrounded by. Suddenly light wasn’t just at the end of the tunnel, but all around, enveloping, interlaced throughout the dark.
The darkness became something not to be escaped by stepping completely into light, but experienced in between the brightness, clarifying the luminescent shapes. This structure relied on darkness just as much as it relied on light.
And thus perhaps this physical embodiment of light did end up expressing an old adage: we cannot truly see the light without the darkness. We cannot appreciate the good without the bad. And life is a wonderful delicate mixture of the two to explore and appreciate. Just like this illuminated dome.
