Are you ready Bristol? Bristol Light Festival will once again bring a stunning combination of light, sound and colour to the heart of the city. After attracting 250,000 visitors in 2023, the fourth iteration of the award-winning festival will take place between February 2 to 11, 2024 – including nine new-to-Bristol installations, alongside the return of a festival favourite.
Welcoming artists from near and far to showcase masterful light-based installations in this immersive, family-friendly event of talent, the Bristol Light Festival will host 10 installations across the city’s most iconic spots. These include two installations by Somerset-based This is Loop, PULSE and Emergence, as well as an immersive artwork by multidisciplinary art collective, Atelier Sisu, Elysian. The festival’s popular Swing Song, produced by Bristol Light Festival and Tired Industries, also returns.
Katherine Jewkes, Creative Director of Bristol Light Festival, said: “We are absolutely over the moon to have so many incredible artists involved with our next edition. This programme is starting to feel really special and is reflective of Bristol’s creative spirit. Each year our aim is to bring new and show-stopping artworks to Bristol, creating spaces for people to play, explore and have new experiences. We can’t wait to welcome everyone to the Bristol Light Festival and once again fill the city with colour and light.”
What installations are at Bristol Light Festival 2024
Ascendance by Davy and Kristin McGuire, Studio McGuire
Premiering for the very first time anywhere in the world at St Stephen’s Church, Ascendance is the creation of Studio McGuire. The pair wowed visitors to last year’s Bristol Light Festival with Ophelia and Sirens, but this is arguably their most emotive work to date. This interstellar installation is inspired by the idea of loneliness and features an isolated astronaut floating alone in the cosmos – who creates an almost angelic figure in space.
Davy and Kristin McGuire said: “We are delighted to be returning to the Bristol Light Festival, which is such an inspiring setting for us to showcase our work. 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.”
Evanescent by Atelier Sisu
Evanescenton College Green explores the idea of “transience through the visualisation of bubbles”. An immersive, light and sound temporary environment, the work is by award-winning Sydney-based art practice Atelier Sisu, led by Peruvian sculptor and industrial designer, Renzo B Larriviere alongside architect and artist Zara Pasfield. The pair are known for creating experiential environments, installations and unique sculptural pieces.
Renzo B. Larriviere and Zara Pasfield said: “We want our art-chitecture to connect audiences with their environment. We have designed Evanescent to be truly inclusive. By emulating the airy-like quality and magic of bubbles, we want to appeal to human beings’ universal playfulness and sense of childlike wonder, while encouraging the audience to consider the world around them as a delicate space, like that of a bubble. We are extremely proud to be bringing this work to Bristol Light Festival 2024.”
WildLight by BBC Studios
Reflecting over 60 years of BBC Studios NHU making wildlife films, WildLight brings life-size animal illuminations to Finzels Reach. See dolphins, meerkats and fireflies by the harbour as Left Handed Giant Brewpub is transformed into a giant TV set with animals escaping the screen.
Elysian by Atelier Sisu
Inspired by the ever-changing nature of the world, Elysian immerses guests within illuminated arches to both walk through and under at Quakers Friars. Inflatable in nature, the work is described as being “at the precipice of change” by the artist. Accompanied by a soundscape, making it a fully immersive experience, the texture of the artwork allows the material to reflect both natural and artificial light in a unique and eye-catching way.
The Nectary by Alison Smith and Dr Chris Hassall
A multi-sensory and immersive light artwork, The Nectary invites guests to step inside a giant flower to gain a unique perspective on nature in Queen Square. Created by artist Alison Smith and Dr Chris Hassall, lecturer in Animal Biology at the University of Leeds, the installation is an art/science crossover highlighting the importance of pollinating insects. The inspiration for the piece came from the work of PhD student Thomas Daily at the University of Leeds looking into bio-acoustics as a new way of monitoring insect populations by listening to them.
PULSE by This is Loop
PULSE is an immersive audio-visual installation that welcomes visitors to step inside enormous rings of light. Made up of more than 14,000 individual LEDs, you’ll find it at Lloyd’s Amphitheatre. The main show is a five-minute high-intensity and fast-paced audio-visual journey, best viewed from start to finish, with a custom track by audio artist Dan Bibby aka Weatherbrow. An accompanying 20-minute-long piece with a slower, more ambient feel can be joined at any point.
The Unfolding by SLX
The ruins of Temple Church will be magically illuminated by Alex Keighley from SLX. The Unfolding invites audiences to look up and watch beams of light gently move to the music – set to the title track from Hannah Peel’s No. 1 Classical Chart Album, which was written for and featuring Bristol’s own Paraorchestra – bringing the building to life through light.
Emergence by This is Loop
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 in Broadmead. Each section is constructed to create an optical illusion, creating a sphere of light when viewed from close by and a giant grid of light when from a short distance. This allows for different experiences depending on where you’re standing.
Harriet Lumby and Alan Hayes said: “We’re so excited to be a part of Bristol Light Festival for 2024. We love nothing more than seeing our work out in the world and watching people interact with and learn from our installations. The art we create is about bringing playful sculptures to audiences, to engulf them in a visual experience like no other. PULSE and Emergence are two very different installations, but both are designed to change the way audiences experience light and the space around them, and we can’t wait to see the reactions from the people of Bristol.”
Swing Song, based on a concept by Bristol Light Festival and brought to life by Tired Industries
Swing Song has been a standout installation at Bristol Light Festival in previous editions. A series of six swings, the childhood favourite artwork is set to music produced especially for the festival. One swing controls the bassline, another controls the melody, and a third controls drums and percussion. Small movements produce simple tunes, but as users swing higher and higher, the tracks evolve into more complex melodies. Surrounding the installation in Queen Square this time around will be various interactive games, so all can enjoy an increasingly more playful environment.
Bristol Is Always A Good Idea by Real Hackney Dave
Bristol is Always a Good Idea is inspired by the work of Dave Buonaguidi aka Real Hackney Dave – the Hackney-based artist combining the visual and verbal language of advertising and propaganda with unique imagery and materials to create predominantly language-based pieces of art. The phrase ‘Bristol is Always a Good Idea’ was inspired by postcards featuring the phrase which will now be scaled up and brought to life in huge, eye-catching pink text.
Dave Buonaguidi said: “I love making ideas that are active rather than passive and I often explore the relationship that we have with locations to create extra emotional traction. Screen printing my pink typography onto vintage maps is great fun but I really get excited about bringing the idea to life, in the real world, with huge letters. I have always loved Bristol and the passion that people who live there have for their hometown, so being part of a project that celebrates that is very exciting.”
Bristol Light Festival installations will be lit every evening from 5pm-10pm, between February 2 and 11. You download a copy of the map here, or visit the info hut in Queen Square for a paper copy. To learn more about Bristol Light Festival 2024 head here.