"Birmingham City Council Arts team has visibly moved a long way and diversified from the idea of stainless steel sculptures outside buildings," explained Pierce. "I first made a site-specific exposition for them under Spaghetti Junction in 1993 and over 10,000 people attended. Since then, we’ve done other things, most recently ‘The Gallery in the Trees’ which ran through 1999-2000. The thing is, they (BCC Arts team) have recognised that something temporary can still have a very strong impact."
Interestingly, BCC used the event to kill two birds with one stone: "They wanted to use the event to showcase colour-changing lighting, how it can affect the environment, to developers, planners and urban architects." Pierce went on to explain that Birmingham City is currently undergoing a great deal of re-development: "They are drafting a Lighting Strategy and will invite developers to have a ‘lighting policy’ as an integrated part of their planning application. What the BCC wants is lighting that makes the city safer, more attractive and accessible, and thus in the long run, more sustainable. They recognise that the creative use of lighting can have an economic impact. They want good quality lighting in all new schemes."
Jill Robinson of the City architects office, and Nigel Edmonson from the European Unit arranged for Pierce to ‘use’ Oozells Square as his metaphorical canvas. "I had three areas to work with: the first, the Ikon Gallery was built in 1880 and is a Gothic revival building with masses of features and dark red brickwork. It is surrounded by several of the city’s leading restaurants, not least the ‘Petite Blanc’, and that’s one of the reasons they chose this area, it’s a very interesting public space, but under-exploited."
Pierce also had the adjacent Zen Garden, another successful piece of public art, designed by Paul de Monchaux in the classic Japanese 70:30 proportions. Most significantly his third area was the newly completed, but empty, office development, 6 Brindley Place.
"The Argent Group had redeveloped the whole of Brindley Place and they were particularly co-operative in letting me use the inside of the building." As can be seen from the photos, Pierce did something very different here, instead of washing the exterior in an array of colours from the outside, he placed all lighting equipment inside. "I wanted to project the building out in a modernist light. Like Mondrian, squares, colours and spaces. It’s not revolutionary, but it’s colourful and yet not too busy." For the Ikon, Pierce used sombre, but rich colours, mauves and deep purples, accentuating the verticals, something that gave a gravity to contrast with the bright tones of Brindley Place.
All the lighting for the project was supplied by LSD Fourth Phase, with Geoff Jones from Illuminatum providing a laser. "The laser was originally intended for the Garden’s water feature, but it was too distracting, so we had it gently scanning across the surface of the gravel. All the lighting was very much a collaborative effort. The logistics and the technical side of things were handled by Martin Nicholas."
Pierce has worked with Nicholas and LSD before: "He supports me, I support him. This was a complex piece of lighting that needed to be specified, installed and then removed, quickly (just four days in/up and out). The arts field can be like that, and LSD are ideally suited to working under those kind of pressures - you couldn’t do this with a conv
