Lumen Print Collection: Filming the Installation at Newcastle Helix
A short film of the Lumen Print Collection being installed at The Lumen, Newcastle Helix, in 2020, made for Northern Print alongside a film for each of its six artists.
About the Film
The Lumen Print Collection is a permanent collection of original prints curated by Northern Print for The Lumen, an office building at Newcastle Helix in the centre of Newcastle, designed by Ryder Architecture for Legal & General. In September 2020 I filmed the collection being installed, and this short film is the record of that day.
It was one of a series of films I made for Northern Print about the collection that autumn: a film for each of the six artists, a short announcement and an overview of the finished collection. The artist films were released through September and October 2020, and Northern Print still has them on its own page about the project.
The Lumen Print Collection and the Theme of Light
Northern Print set light as the theme, which suited a building called The Lumen. The six artists, Rachael Clewlow, Sarah Duncan, Katherine Jones, Nick Loaring, Anja Percival and Eunice Routledge, each took it somewhere different, from streetlights and lit interiors to sunlight across the sea and the glow of night skies. Several of them also used light to make the work, through laser cutting and photography, so the theme runs through the process as well as the finished prints.
Three of the six are based in the North East, Clewlow in Newcastle and Percival and Routledge in County Durham, something Northern Print made a point of when it announced the collection.
Two of the artist films have their own pages here. Rachael Clewlow’s piece traces sites connected to Joseph Swan, the Newcastle inventor of the incandescent light bulb, and is covered in the map art documentary film I made with her. Nick Loaring turned his commission into three interlinked letterpress prints, which you can see taking shape in the letterpress documentary film.
Filming the Installation
An installation gives you a short window. The building has its own working day going on around you, the people hanging the work need to get on with it, and once the prints are on the walls that part of the story is over. I kept the kit small and stayed out of the way, filming the prints arriving, being carried in and going up as it happened, without asking anyone to stop or repeat anything.
The Lumen is a large glass-fronted building with long corridors and a lot of reflective surfaces, so the light changes from one space to the next. That suited a collection about light, but it meant working each shot out as I went rather than setting up a look in advance and carrying it through the day.
The overhead shots were my first try at what I call RLS technology, which stands for Really Long Stick: an iPhone on the end of a selfie stick, attached to a second selfie stick. From that height the footage looks a lot like a security camera, which was too good not to play up with a collection of valuable prints on the move. I have since refined it to a single long pole with a DJI Osmo Pocket 3 on the end, and it has become a regular part of my kit on projects where a drone is not possible.
A nod to small cameras and art heists: the prints on their way in, as a security camera might have seen them.
Six Artist Films in a Year of Lockdowns
The artist films were made in 2020, when getting into studios was not straightforward. COVID restrictions meant I could only film Nick Loaring and Rachael Clewlow in person. The other artists filmed parts of their own process, Sarah Duncan, Katherine Jones and Anja Percival among them, and I edited their footage so the six films still worked together as a set.
Northern Print’s director, Anna Wilkinson, said at the time that light felt like a particularly positive theme to be working with that year, and that the collection was about making The Lumen a better place to work.
Northern Print and the Glossary Films
Northern Print is a printmaking studio, gallery and education charity in the Ouseburn Valley, close to Newcastle city centre. It gives artists access to presses and studio space, runs courses and work with schools, and puts on a regular programme of exhibitions. The Lumen was not my first project with them.
In 2014 I made seven short films for Glossary, an exhibition that brought together printmakers from across the UK and was built around the range of printmaking techniques rather than a single theme. Each film followed one artist and one technique, from Julian Meredith’s large woodcuts to Stephen Chambers’ potato prints, and all seven are gathered on the Glossary page.
Two of the Lumen artists had been part of Glossary too. In 2014 I filmed Rachael Clewlow working on a nine-colour screenprint built from her recorded journeys, and Katherine Jones building a collagraph plate for a commission from the DLI Museum. The Lumen films picked up both stories six years later, with a new brief and a very different way of working. Katherine Jones has since been elected a Royal Academician.
Why Record an Installation
A permanent collection in an office building is seen mostly by the people who work there. The films give the artists and Northern Print a way to show the Lumen Print Collection to everyone else, and they keep a record of how it came together, from each artist’s studio to the walls of the building. The installation film is the shortest of the set, but it is the only one that shows the prints arriving in the place they were made for.
More of my work with printmakers, artists and galleries is on the Artists & Culture page.
Planning a similar project?
I work with artists, print studios, galleries and cultural organisations to make films that stay close to the work. If this feels close to something you are working on, I would be happy to talk.
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