This November, Lumiere Durham 2025 will take over the city with extravagant spectacles of artistic light displays which will illuminate some of the city and county’s most iconic sites. Lumiere is the UK’s light art biennial programmed and produced by Artichoke. Since the first Lumiere Durham in 2009, the event has attracted 1.3 million visitors to the region.
Walkergate is proud to be an official sponsor of Lumiere. We’re supporting this landmark event in County Durham’s cultural calendar for the seventh year in a row, housing a selection of Lumiere’s exhibitions for visitors to the area to enjoy. Visitors to Lumiere and Durham will be able to bear witness to the exclusive artwork situated within Walkergate and across the city this autumn.
But before we welcome Durham’s light art biennial Lumiere 2025 back to Walkergate, let’s take a look back at some of the stunning installations we have hosted here at the heart of the city centre.
2013: Litre of Light, Mick Stephenson, Central Saint Martin Students, MyShelter Foundation
By filling a plastic bottle with water, adding a drop of bleach and pushing it through a hole in the roof, you create a sustainable light bulb that can refract as much sunlight through it as a 55-watt bulb. Litre of Light was developed in a collaboration between artist Mick Stephenson and Central St Martin’s students to raise awareness of issues relating to poverty, sustainability and climate change, asking us to acknowledge the growing need for alternative technologies to support our everyday lives.
2015: Dot, Philippe Morvan
A wall of lights, alive with movement and music. An enormous bank of 175 lightbulbs pulsed and flashed in response to a soundtrack, which was especially composed for Lumiere London 2018 by Solomon Grey. Dot’s dots formed patterns and created epic sequences in an ever-changing panorama of horizontal and vertical lines, spheres and cubes.
2017: Illumaphonium, Michael Davis & Anonymous, Lighting Design Collective
Illumaphonium stood over three and a half meters tall and consisted of more than a hundred illuminated chime bars activated by touch to create a multi-sensory, multi-player installation beamed with ever-changing patterns of light and sound.
Inspired by a famous cartoon by Peter Steiner, Anonymous wittily symbolised our ability to send and receive anonymous messages online. It made the audience take the centre stage, step inside the glowing white cube, take to the microphone and anonymously share a thought, tell a joke or even sing.
2019: Human Tiles, Ocubo & The Stars Come Out at Night, Stellar Project
A kaleidoscope of collective action, Human Tiles enveloped the architecture of Walkergate in shape-shifting patterns. The visuals were created in real-time in response to the audience’s movements and the colour of their clothes and transformed the facade of a building within the complex.
Capturing the beauty and wonder of the night sky, The Stars Come Out at Night brought the sparkle of starlight down to earth. The installation gently rotated, casting a universe of stars across the ground, just like the night-time projectors that soothed many of us to sleep as children.
2021: Omnipresence, Irregular, A Bigger Ripple, Tony Heaton OBE, When Today Makes Yesterday Tomorrow, Dominik Lejman, & Halo, Illumaphonium
Omnipresence created an audiovisual, interactive mise en abyme – a technique of placing copies of images inside each other to create an infinite reproduction of an image – that highlighted technology’s ability to curate our digital personae. Visitors moved around a digital infinity mirror that endlessly multiplied their reflection using video feedback, distorting images, delaying projections, reversing recordings. The infinitely mirrored body images disconnected from the audience members initially triggering them, making the viewer lose control of their own actions.
The neon pink work, A Bigger Ripple by Tony Heaton is humorous, subversive and political. A playful typescript, it could be superficially read as a fun image, reminiscent of ice cream, funfairs, seaside, sweet and fruity. With the phrase Raspberry Ripple, Heaton plays on the rhyming slang for “cripple”, arguing that, “words can oppress us but we cripples resurrect it in Crip culture and Crip humour; it’s ours alone to own.”
A rediscovered video mural exploring themes of surveillance and control, When Today Makes Yesterday Tomorrow featured rediscovered footage from 2008 of people exchanging greetings, hugging and shaking hands taking on new meaning and poignancy in 2021.
The original footage was transferred onto negative: when projected onto the wall, its “white on white” image quality with no defined frame created low-quality silhouettes of people reminiscent of surveillance footage.
Halo, an illuminated interactive musical sculpture designed by Illumaphonium, created an evolving and ever-changing sonic and visual landscape that was both soothing and captivating, bringing people together again.
2023: Un-Reel Access, Kappa & Holi, Ocubo
Un-Reel Access: a sealed door from which a white light emerges symbolising hope and at first, seemingly unreachable dreams. The artwork reframes perspectives, inviting audiences to look at the locked entrance differently, insisting there is always an alternate route to achieving one’s goals.
Inspired by the Hindu festival, Holi allowed audiences to play with a million digital colour particles. OCUBO invited people to express themselves at Holi by throwing joyful digital colours onto the Gala Theatre wall through hand and body gestures. First exhibited in Lisbon and in Doha, Qatar, this digital adaptation of the Holi festival spread one million digital colour particles in real-time.
Lumiere Durham Returns This November
Walkergate looks forward to welcoming you to Lumiere Durham this November. Our secure 24/7 covered multi-story car park is the perfect gateway to the biennial light art event, providing instant and convenient access to the installations across Durham city centre. Plus, with a top-notch selection of restaurants and bars, Walkergate is perfect for a pit stop (or two) for anyone enjoying the event without straying far from the action!
