On the luminaries: a year's progress

It's only two days until the luminaries will be unveiled to mark the culmination of the community memoir and public art project. I thought it might be interesting to post some pictures showing how the ideas for the luminaries evolved over the course of the last year.

It started with paper-litho transfers to paper-bag luminaries that I created over a year ago:

The first idea for the Carroll County project was to do transfers of photos of people's faces onto four-sided plexiglass columns:

This idea seemed like it would be too bulky and costly, so it was changed to large intersecting panels of plexiglass without frames:

After the workshops ended, and after discussing it with my collaborators Patty McNair, Pati Johnson, and her husband Michael Johnson, we reverted to the idea of the column format, shown in this rough plan drawing:

And then a watercolour to help visualise how they would be placed:

This is the idea we finally agreed on, and that's how they were constructed:

So it looks more like the very first idea after all. I thoroughly enjoyed having people to discuss the format with, and to alter the plan depending on available materials, costs, and practical problems like 'should the solar light shine upward from below or downward from above?' It always felt like a collaboration, and at no point did I feel like an idea that I 'owned' was being taken away from me.

The next photos that I will put up will be after they are finally unveiled on Saturday night.

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