Fire Lights Music and Arts Festival

Fire Lights Music and Arts Festival was held in western New York state, between Cleveland and Buffalo in Amish country. The festival itself was held at a venue which hosts larger events during the year, but which only needed enough space for a couple thousand people for Fire Lights Festival. I was brought in to add some decoration to the festival’s third stage, the Artist Gallery Tent, which featured a Void soundsystem and a variety of different acts throughout the weekend.

The tent was a blue, white and grey pattern which didn’t lend itself well to creating a traditional straight-line piece, as I had originally planned, due to excess conflict for viewers between the tent pattern and any pattern created by the yarn. So instead I chose to employ an idea I’ve been brewing for a little while. I re-used some tubing with hooks placed at 1ft intervals and twisted the 175′ long section of tubing to swirl around one side of the tent above visitors’ heads.

For the colors I chose white (which fluoresces blue), orange and yellow (which fluoresces a greenish-yellow color) because those are the traditional colors of a flame viewed from bottom to top. So using this deconstructed flame idea I wove straight-line strands of yarn between the hooks in a way which caused a great amount of overlap while also creating scale and depth with the entire piece. As the tubing twists around the ceiling of the tent the different colored strands overlap to create a wide variety of angles, color effects, and unique shapes. The section of orange and yellow which curves around a tent pole experienced only the most minor displacement due to the pole’s placement (only on 2-3 strands), and the majority of the piece bent around the pole without touching completely by accident and without any preplanning. I love it when an installation comes together like that.

Overall, install took 12 hours and the piece’s total size fit into a roughly 75′ square.

Below is a time-lapse video of the install. Unfortunately, the camera died before the white/blue section was installed, but it still captures a good amount of the install process.