LightPool Festival fills the streets of Blackpool with over 30 artworks and commissions to be found in locations around the town centre and promenade, together with live performances and events. Visitors will find installations by emerging artists from the North West including Liz West alongside those of internationally renowned artists such as Mark Titchner and Yoko Ono.
The Grundy has initiated and helped produce two major projects, by Ron Haselden and Bob and Roberta Smith. Ron Haseldon’s Brothers and Sisters (2005-ongoing) situated in a former hotel earmarked to become an Art Bed and Breakfast, and his pink ladder Echelle (2000), positioned on the central church spire. In a further work, Bob and Roberta Smith has designed a series of large illuminated directional signs spelling ‘ART IS YOUR HUMAN RIGHT’ as you walk down to the seafront.
The outdoor works from the Grundy’s exhibition NEON: The Charged Line also form part of the festival route. These include Tim Etchells’ Let’s Pretend (2008) – which reads in bold text above the gallery ‘Let’s Pretend None Of This Ever Happened’ – Prem Sahib’s BUMP, positioned outside the rear fire escape of the gallery, suggestive of an illicit nightclub, and Paulina Olowska’s Workers Canteen (Bar Mleczny) (2010), a refurbished neon from Soviet-era Warsaw, re-presented outside Blackpool’s Winter Gardens.
LightPool Festival is funded by the Coastal Communities Fund, Blackpool Council and Arts Council England, and undertaken in partnership with Blackpool Illuminations and the Grundy Art Gallery. Brothers and Sisters has been kindly supported by specialist