Charles Monkhouse

Evening Glory

Lighting

12th - 15th October (from dusk)

Project description:

A chain of thirteen lights around the summit of The Old Man of Coniston; a spectacle, a celebration and even a love token, to one of the most iconic mountain (views) in England. Flickering into sight at dusk, intensifying with darkness but fading towards midnight. Pinpoints of light shining from the intense darkness of autumn fells, evoking the awe and mystery of night and that false illusion of the celestial sphere upon which the mind projects, not only the stars, but the characters of Greek mythology. Evening Glory is a piece to be seen during an autumn evening, following a day communing with the gods on the fell tops.

Artists statement:

I’ve visited and worked in the English Lakes all my life yet I am still influenced by my early years based at the south end of Coniston Water. Much of my student work was based around and even in Coniston Water, and I return again and again to the form and colour of its perpetual landscape and its changing seasons. My first professional exhibitions were in Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal. So Evening Glory unites previous work and previous passions: a student obsession with perspective and projection; landscape art and its history in the English Lakes; Illumine- a year of witnessed moon rises; Parsley Hay - light installations in a disused rail cutting; personal fascination with astronomy and its depiction of Greek mythology; and nights spent drifting in clinker boats on Coniston Water, watching car headlights ricochet around the valley while waiting for the moon to rise over the eastern fells.