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Installation: Light of Darkness Artist: Sanchayan Ghosh
Trail map locationFramwelgate Bridge
Light of Darkness will be suspended under the arches of the Framwelgate Bridge. Inspiration for this piece draws on a number of sources and the artist describes it as a memoir to the Venerable Bede and the coal miners of Durham.
Constructed partially from miners’ helmets the piece represents those who brought light from darkness: the miners who cut the coal from the core of the earth in the darkness of the pits and brought the fuel to the surface to create light. Mining helped to drive the progress of ‘The Age of Enlightenment’ – a new age characterised by reason, science and a respect for humanity – the coal helping to power the scientific revolution.
Further inspiration came from a story about the Venerable Bede. The story suggests that Bede’s eyesight failed in later life, and he was tricked by a small boy into preaching to an audience of trees, bushes and rocks; however, he did so with such passion and belief that the trees and bushes responded at the end of his sermon with ‘Amen Venerable Bede’. To the artist, Bede in this story represents a bridge between faith and rationality. The inner eye is also a recurrent image in Indian religion and philosophy: a third eye of spiritual sight which sees things the physical eyes cannot. The design of the eyes is inspired by the traditional mask and folk art of Bengal.
Sanchayan Ghosh is an artist and lecturer working in the department of painting at Kala Bhavana, an acclaimed and distinguished centre for visual arts practice and research founded by the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore at the Visva Bharati University in West Bengal, India.
Sanchayan’s work currently focuses on exploring methods of participation in multiple public sites and evolving site-specific community based art activities. This approach has afforded Sanchayan the opportunity to work with and reach a wide variety of people including three generations of Asian communities in Bristol, the weavers of the Bodo communities of Assam in eastern India and a number of migratory communities in Calcutta and wider India.
My present area of concern revolves around the transformation of land, history, memories, people and home. In this respect I am interested in the context of identity, shift and the emergence of new spaces of relationship. Most of my installations are multi-sensory and interdisciplinary involving both the aspect of new media and dialogical, interactive situations.
Sanchayan Ghosh