Playing With Light
Read one of our founders Gill Gill's beautiful words to find out why we still love making lanterns to this day. This was written 18 years ago and still rings true today. It documents where we started, where we've been and why lantern making is so important to us and those that we work with.
Author - Gill Gill, Published in Mailout in 2003
Playing with light
For more than fifteen years we have been making lanterns. The now "traditional" willow and tissue paper pyramids, tiny wire birds, lumbering constructions on wheelbarrows, perforated tins, glowing paper bags.
Not to mention working with other lights in the darkness: road menders' lamps, mobile fire drawings, torches, candles, fairy lights, fires and the odd burning brazil nut.
Much of this has been work in and with local communities in North Staffordshire near our base, of course, and in so many other diverse places. The towers of the citadel of Sigisoara carried around the old town, bats flying from the clock pyramids. Wayward pyramids on the Marina at Wellington NZ tide turned -floated the wrong way. lanterns and Bhangra round Bedworth. In the mud on the rubbish tip at Karasebes refugee camp. On giant polystyrene floats on the river in Hotton. high in the Alps at Fondo and Ceresole. In Lochgilphead and Arhus and Zalaergeszeg (long before that football match), as well as the apparently less exotic locations of Tipton, Stoke, Crewe and the ex-mining village of Wood Lane where we did our first lantern procession.
The thing is, we love it, we've made lanterns ourselves, taught others, encouraged them to create their own lantern events without us. Why do we still have an appetite for lanterns? Almost every other aspect of our work has changed, and we like to find new things to do. Why do we find constant inspiration in working with and making lanterns?
Lanterns land themselves to the creation not only of processions but other kinds of theatrical events. Massed lanterns can be stunning, yet a single lantern can have startling impact. The lantern procession has become a recognised form of event throughout Britain and beyond - it can be endlessly repeated, reassuringly the same, always different. For communities, especially those struggling with alienation and disaffection, a lantern procession offers the possibility of creating new traditions: yet the same event gives possibilities of invention, exploration and change. Add to this the convenient fact that lanterns can reflect any theme from the most literal to the most abstract and it's clear why artists as well as communities are keen to work with them.
And then anybody, pretty much, can make a lantern to be proud of: toddlers (with help), kids and families, stroppy adolescents, elders, people with various levels of skill and experience. It's great to watch parents working with their children to create something unique, to see groups negotiating the design of a shared lantern, or to help somebody who has been told they're "not artistic" to make something beautiful. Language doesn't seem to matter much and lantern making seems to make sense to people from many cultures and backgrounds. You can learn to make a lantern in half an hour and then spend as long as you like learning more, developing techniques, honing skills, setting and meeting new challenges. There is, as John Fox (you wouldn't expect to get through a whole lantern article without reference to Welfare State, would you?) says, a particular pleasure in thinking with your hands , and the unexpected places that can take us. This, perhaps, is why families in Ulverston and Lochgilphead (and hods of other towns) return year on year to make lanterns for local processions. Their lanterns get bigger and more ambitious, and then usually smaller, more complex and subtle, and each year new families come along to start the process over.
Moreover, the techniques of lantern making are endlessly variable. A lantern is a portable light. It needs a structure or frame, a covering skin and a light source. There is no absolute recipe for a successful lantern. Now I love making lanterns in willow and tape, and wet strength tissue and some disgusting glue: but you can make yours how you like. Cropped willow (thanks to Musgrove and Son of Somerset, our long-time supplier) is workable and effective, but you don't have to use it. We have cut all kinds of wood in strange places, used bamboo and pea sticks, worked with wire and cardboard too. For covering, wet-strength tissue is smart and tough, if expensive, but there are many alternatives, especially when necessity is driving your inventiveness: cloth, coloured tissue, papers of all kinds, even newspaper. Our first effort was with bread-wrapping tissue that dissolved in the glue and taxed our ingenuity and patience, cheap though.
The lantern surface can be decorated or plain. We sometimes used to paint them with FEV, though diluting colours with meths in community workshops seems to have gone out of style. We've used coloured tissue and logging gels and black papercuts. best of all we like 'em plain and glowing. Except when we don't. The thing is, the simple lantern can always be changing.
There is, though, something else about lanterns, beyond the pleasure of making them, greater than resolving a technical problem, more than the high of a shared event. For a start, there is being out in the dark, on the streets together, the hum of voices, with or without the obligatory percussion band.
And there is the image of light, it's fragility in a larger darkness, that can take your heart away. There is an implicit meaning here that isn't too hard to tease out, however conventional or cliched the glib idea of 'light in the darkness' might at first appear.
So what has been my favourite lantern moment? In 1997, we were in the city of Mostar, Bosnia Hercegovinia, launching the World Health Organisation's Atlas of Decentralised Cooperation. We had made lanterns in the east with boys in a school and in the west at a youth centre, but our local and international friends were despondent about our chances of doing what we had planned: carry the lanterns from the two side of the town, more divide than now, to a meeting place outside the Hotel Euro with its "no small arms" sign and busy internationals.
Half an hour before the event, the Mayor signed the necessary permission and we started. On one side, fifteen or so boys, their head teacher, a handful of our chums, on the other side one fourteen year-old boy and an eleven year-old girl - and a car of armed police. Would a volunteer from each side agree to exchange their lanterns we met? "I think that would be a good idea" was the thoughtful reply from the boy who couldn't even remember ever meeting anybody from the other side. So we walked towards each other on one of the shortest, most nerve-wracking lantern processions any of us had ever done.
As our handful of drums started, we imagined a stately, meaningful, theatrical exchange of lanterns with maybe a weighty word or two. But as they caught sight of each other, the boys ran and thrust their lanterns into each others' hands. The police from at least one side of the town danced in the street.
What does it mean? Certainly not that our few lanterns can change the serious political situation in Bosnia - or anywhere else. we are not so self-important or significant. That we can nurture hope and help it grow in others? Maybe. But it is, I think, a reminder that the use we make of our art is everything.
And that after the celebration of skill and making, the fun of invention, the joy of the shared event, the real potential of working with lanterns, as with everything else that we do, is about context and meaning.
And that is how it should be.