In September 2025 I was brought on to a very special project in collaboration with TWLS and Artin Light. We were tasked by Beam Arts to create a community sourced opening show for the new Yorkshire Rose sculptures by artist Tim Ward. These sculptures mark a historical moment for Barnsley as it becomes the UK’s first Tech town, with an emphasis on creativity and youth engagement.
The Rose sculptures all represented a different part of Barnsley’s culture. Mater was the mothering welcoming presence, Pruna the face of the hard work down the mines in a time gone by, with Vitrum a beacon for creativity and craftsmanship in the rich tradition of glassmaking in Barnsley’s past.
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My role in the project was holistic, from community interviewing to the final lighting and narrative design. I first helped to do community outreach through an interactive installation at the town’s light festival - bright nights. I filmed footage around the local area and spent a day chatting to people around the town while I was doing it. This was then projected through original Barnsley glass ash trays and bottles, refracting the footage into ambient lighting - an alchemical mashup of past and present to set the scene for the event. This was paired with a projection mapping on some informational posters I had designed - Information posters can be dull and we wanted a way to draw people in - projection mapping worked a treat as it drew young and old alike into our space to find out what was going on.
From this event and going forward, we did many sessions of interviews talking to everybody we could find - the mayor, primary school kids, shopkeepers, local historians, you name it. Our aim was to find out the core of Barnsley from the ground up, and truly represent this in our opening show. With a rich history of solidarity and unions in the town, it was really important for us to keep the show egalitarian and crowdsourced.
We worked closely with Matthew Williams from Hazard media to turn all these interviews into a rousing and emotional 15 minute piece of music, pulling out all the stops and showing off every capability of the 18 speaker spatial audio soundsystem that DZA Technical had installed. He made some special software just to be able to preview the mixes accurately through headphones.
Stuart from TLWS also built bespoke preview and programming software, and through this we were able to get an accurate preview of what the Roses would look like with our creations playing through them well before they were ready to be tested in real life. Stuart designed the main show, and I focussed on providing some special bits of refracted rainbow footage, using sections of historical Barnsley glass recycled from the Bright Nights events. This was then used in the final show as shimmering textures, ensuring that at every stage of the process from the audio to the lighting design, it was rooted in real history, physical objects and soul. This continued a kind of morphic resonance from the glass factory 100 years ago to the present day sculptures which wouldn’t exist without the factory as one of many parts which makes Barnsley what it is today.
This was an incredibly enjoyable project to work on - it’s not often I get to record audio, design colouring-in sheets for primary school kids, and film high-grade refraction footage all in one week. I grew up in the neighboring town of Wakefield, so having seen Barnsley’s progress over the years I was very happy to have been included in this little piece of local