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We have to be there before dusk,’ my wife said. Strictly speaking we had to get here before twilight, but we were in a hurry and I had already made a wrong turn
so I wasn’t going to be pedantic. We were on holiday
in Norfolk at the end of August when as a family, we
visited the James Turrell exhibition, Lightscape: James
Turrell at Houghton. Houghton Hall in West Norfolk
has a fundamental association with art; Robert
Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, amassed an art
collection for the nation and built the hall to house it
in the early 18th century. In 2013 Houghton positioned
itself again as an art venue of national importance with
‘Houghton Revisited’, an exhibition that recreated its
original 18th century hang of pictures, which Walpole’s
grandson had to sell to Catherine the Great to cover
debts. This group of works eventually formed a core
part of the holdings at the Hermitage Museum in
St Petersburg, and the Russian museum generously
loaned the pictures back to Houghton for this popular
and critically acclaimed show.
But before this noted exhibition was staged,
contemporary art at Houghton already held a
significant place. Included in the grounds among
works by Richard Long, Anya Gallacio, Zhan Wang,
Stephen Cox, Jeppe Hein and Rachel Whiteread,
are two large-scale commissions by US artist James
Turrell, whose previous work as a pilot and Quaker
faith has helped shape an artistic vision that focuses
rigorously on human perceptions of light. The
Skyspace, Seldom Seen, finished in 2002, has long
been open to the public and forms part of the visitor
experience at Houghton. St Elmo’s Breath, first realised
in 1992 and later commissioned for the interior of the
water tower, remained a private work not accessible
to the public, but is now one of the key works in the
Lightscape exhibition.
Norfolk seems a fitting venue for an artist who has
throughout his practice worked with light and the sky.
The landscape in Norfolk stretches to any number of
ambiguous vanishing points, whereas the sky is ever
present in its vastness. The sky defines the county
more than the landscape. But this is not particular
to Norfolk. Like an atmospheric genius locus, the sky
and the light that filters through it, can define a place
and one’s experience there: feet on the ground, head
in the sky.
For the past 15 years, we have as a family spent as
many weekends and summer holidays as possible in
North Norfolk in an old coastguard Cottage with no
electricity, perched above the sea 20 metres from a
cliff edge. The kids have no screens and, as odd as it
may seem for a lighting designer, we have no electric
lights. There are paraffin lamps, gas mantles (which we
don’t use that often because of the noise and greenish
light) and some battery-powered LED lights for night
lights after bedtime. But the main source of light is the
daylight. In the winter the sun skirts above the Cromer
ridge and hovers there for as long as it can. In high
summer it rises over the North Sea and sets in the
Wash only seeming to dip below the horizon for a few
hours. In Britain it is unusual to be in a place where
the sun begins and ends its journey in water; it is one
of the sky’s defining features in North Norfolk. But
my absolute favourite time, regardless of the season, is
twilight. When it gets dark in the house and my family
asks me to light the lamps, my usual reply is: ‘Can we
hold off a little longer? There is still a lot of light in the
sky and lighting the lamps just brings on the darkness.’
Twilight as an experience of light has taught me
more about lighting design than perhaps any other
phenomenon. Twilight teaches us about relative
brightness, about shifts in colour temperature, about
diffusion on a cloudy evening or point sources on a
sunny evening. And I am always amazed by both the
quality and quantity of light at this time. So as a lighting
designer, approaching the work of James Turrell, I
come to it with these insights and expectations about
the transition of light over time.
We knew the exhibition required time. It required
time to see the entire show, which had works displayed
across the estate’s buildings and the park. There were
‘Norfolk seems a fitting venue for an artist
who has throughout his practice worked
with light and the sky’
