LUMIERE DURHAM

  • Helen Marriage
  • Steve McEvoy
The UK’s largest light festival returned to Durham in November 2015. An international array of artists lit the city once more in spectacular and unexpected ways.

An estimated 200,000 people visited the festival over four evenings. Despite torrential downpours, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to enjoy the fourth Lumiere Durham light festival.

Commissioned by Durham County Council and supported by Arts Council England and a raft of sponsors, once again the city became a new and temporary community full of local and international artists, arts professionals and visitors, all united by a mutual interest in art and a hunger for a transformative collective experience.

Audiences braved the elements to see twenty-nine extraordinary art installations spread across Durham’s city centre, including a whale in the River Wear, a ghostly fog beneath the Cathedral, and 250 locals appearing to storm the 50 metre-high arches of Durham Viaduct, in Asalto Durham, a projected artwork by Spanish artist Daniel Canogar.