Love & Light

Just found images from the Love & Light public arts event that I was involved in organising at St Margaret's Barking on the website of the VJs, SDNA, who created the artwork. To see the images click here, find Media and watch the showreel.

SDNA, British and Italian creatives Ben Foot and Valentina Floris, are two of London's leading digital artists and VJ's (visual jockeys). They have created visuals live in a number of fashionable clubs such as 93 Feet East and Cargo as well as staging some memorable interactive sets for theatres and performances at Riverside Studios, Camden Lock, the Victoria and Albert Museum and a Russian island in the Baltic Sea!

In February 2005 St Margaret's Barking become the centrepiece of a public art performance entitled Love & Light. SDNA filmed and digitally animated both members of the congregation and the surrounding flora and wildlife, setting them within delicate moving imagery before projecting them onto the windows of the church. People arriving at the churchyard's gatehouse (the Curfew Tower) were reminded of the churchyard's importance as a green space at the heart of a concrete jungle as they were greeted by the sight of the churchyard's squirrels filling the window of the Curfew Tower's chapel.

Moving through the Tower into the churchyard, the church itself was a blaze of light and colour, filled with flowers and wildlife and people. Its stained glass, including Jesus among the elders, the Last Supper, the crucifixion and the ascension, was all brightly lit and clearly visible in all its delicate colours. Alongside, projected onto the clear windows of the church, were moving images of the local body of Christ at St Margaret's - dancing mums, waving ladies, an eight piece dance group, the verger and curate racing each other up the Church Tower, an imaginary teenage rock band, and a number of other spinning, walking, waving, smiling members of the congregation. This piece, rightly entitled Abbey Happy, was the church at play. To see photos from the event click here.