Outdoor Culture's contribution was the production of a community project with artist Lynda Cornwell and the Burnham-based Mona Lisa Arts and Media, based at the Flux Gallery on the village High Street.
Lynda worked with a local youth group and some A-level art students to create four moving image projections of the ancient trees from Burnham Beeches, which we projected large-scale onto the buildings of Burnham High Street for the event last week.
The project was intended to re-connect the village with the forest that bears its name, and to play with the Christmas tree tradition by using light to celebrate nature in the dark time of the year. And of course, creating the images gave the participants a reason to get out and enjoy Burnham Beeches, including a night walk under the moonlight.
The weather was really against us - the projector hire company insisted, just days before the show, that we house their equipment indoors and project out onto the street through windows, which meant re-thinking the four sites we had originally planned and getting last minute permissions to use people's upstairs windows (Thank-you The Olde Swan and Sherrif Mountford!). Then there was the issue of the DVDs being edited in Newcastle and delayed in the post by the snow ...
Anyway, we got there with some bright creative thinking from production manager Tim Hand (eg mounting projectors in cars!) and the show looked great. I particularly liked the way that traditional-looking landscape images morphed slowly into crazy neon fantasies. The show repaid the time you invested in looking at it, and seemed to spark people's interest.
Well done Lynda, and thanks to Rhonda Fenwick, Tim Hand and his crew, Ruth Best, Stephen Spencer and Paul Sherrif. Project funded by the Big Lottery Fund through Awards For All.
