20th January
London light festivals seem a bit thin on the ground this year. Battersea Power Station is taking a break from theirs and Westfield West London’s “Here We Glow” looks to have been a one off last year. At Canary Wharf however it’s business as usual so I headed up on day one for a look.
Free to visit Winter Lights is on from 20th to 31st of January and runs from 5pm to 10pm each day. Sixteen temporary installations are spread throughout the Canary Wharf estate alongside the nine permanent works which are there year round.
They vary in size and wow factor with some being full-on sound and light shows and others a bit underwhelming. If you look near each there will be an explanatory panel but it’s easy (and advisable) to ignore the Art Bolx and just enjoy the exhibits for themselves. Pick up a free map from the pink-tabard clad stewards on site or download it before you go else you’ll probably miss something. I never found 6b (indoors somewhere and I wasn’t the only person having trouble locating it) and another one, outdoors in this case I could have missed even though I had a map if there hadn’t been a crowd round it.
Stand outs for me were FloWeЯ PoWeЯ by Aerosculpture/Jean-Pierre David and Christian Thellier down near Westferry Circus, Hulahoop by Scale in Union Square, and Manifestation by Marcus Lyall in West Lane. Several others were pretty good too, again mostly the ones with the benefit of movement.
I arrived at about 5pm and by 7.30pm had managed to do the whole circuit (not necessarily in order) and by that time the temperature had begun to drop sharply so I took my frozen fingers indoors to find something to eat before heading back to Waterloo and the train home.
Although it was fairly busy with plenty of “phone zombies” to try and dodge I’d recommend visiting midweek and avoiding the weekends especially if you want to photograph or video anything. That’s because from previous experience the weekends are like someone left the gate to the twat farm open and it’s harder to even get a good look at the installations.
If you can’t get there at all here’s a Flickr Album (69 photos).
And here’s a video (YouTube, 14 minutes).
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