• Swindon & Wiltshire Culture
• Thursday January 4 2024
• Author Name: Peter Davison

Bristol Light Festival to return to city in February

Bristol City Centre Business Improvement District has announced the return of the award-winning Bristol Light Festival in February, with a host of new illuminated installations.

The festival has quickly cemented itself as a major regional attraction. Last year 250,000 people visited the show, spending an additional £3.3 million within the local economy.

The week-long festival, which returns to the city between Friday, February 2 and Monday, February 11, will feature the World Premiere of Ascendance by Davy and Kristin McGuire of Studio McGuire.

The interstellar installation (pictured) has been inspired by “the idea of loneliness, and features an isolated astronaut floating alone in the grandness of the cosmos.”

The astronaut will be projected in an iconic as-yet-to-be-revealed Bristol location.

“We are delighted to be returning to the Bristol Light Festival, which is such an inspiring setting for us to showcase our work,” said the creators.

“With Ascendance, we wanted to demonstrate how beauty and sorrow can be deeply linked. The astronaut, who is losing oxygen as he floats untethered amongst the stars, is cocooned in a hallucinatory garden creating an exquisite image that contrasts against the stark sadness of his isolation.

“We are very proud to be unveiling this for the first time in Bristol, a city we called home for a very long time.”

The festival will also mark a South West first for PULSE and Emergence by This is Loop, a Somerset-based collaborative partnership between artists Harriet Lumby and Alan Hayes.

PULSE invites visitors to step inside enormous rings of light made up of more than 14,000 individual LEDs as they travel through the sequence.

The main show is described as “a five-minute high intensity, tightly choreographed and fast-paced audio-visual journey and is best viewed from start to finish. Accompanying this is a 20-minute long piece with a slower, more ambient feel which can be joined at any point.”

Emergence is an award-winning audio-visual art installation, created as a place of contemplation amongst the chaos of the outside world.

The sculpture is a huge, mirrored structure that is completely reflective and designed to provide audiences with a new perspective of a once-familiar space.

And in another South West first, Elysian by Sydney-based art practice Atelier Sisu promises to immerse guests within illuminated arches to both walk through and under.

Bristol Light Festival is delivered by Bristol City Centre Business Improvement District supported by presenting partner Redcliffe & Temple BID and artwork partner Broadmead BID.