Many Hands

We were asked the question “What inspires you?” by Light Collective who curate the back page of the leading international lighting design magazine Mondo Arc.  A page in the December/January edition of the magazine was given over for the response.

So what does inspire us? And moreover, how do we communicate this for the world to see? When presented with great challenges such as this we did what we always do – made some tea and talked about it. At some length! We agreed that collaboration is the most important aspect of our approach to work and central to our inspiration. But how to communicate this?

We also wanted our response to be representative of where we’re from – Mondo Arc is an international publication after all and we are very proud Melbournians!

We eventually arrived at the old saying “many hands make light work” and knew that this was it; we had it. Next thing was to figure out how to express this. Someone said “with light, of course”. Next thing we had the gobo catalogue out, found a theatre projector, identified a location (just HAD  to be Melbourne’s world famous Hosier Lane), teed up one of Melbourne’s best photographers Matt Irwin, designed and had fabricated a neon sign, hired a generator and headed to site one evening, praying we wouldn’t fall foul of the weather or City of Melbourne by-laws inspectors (we had enough to organise without getting a permit to shoot as well!).

We were really pleased with the result – hope you like it too.  See the digital edition and go to page 178 to see it for yourself.

Many hands make light work

Setting up

Trials and tweaks