Charity Event & Lighting of
Remembrance

St Christopher's Hospice planned to have a ceremony and charity event of remembrance as part of their fundraising efforts.

The “Linking of Hearts” event was conceived as an art installation.
The concept was to interconnect thousands of sponsored paper hearts. Each of these hearts would have personalised messages of remembrance from their loved ones, friends and family.
St Christopher's worked with SMA design event lighting specialists to convert this wonderful concept into something sensitive and special given the nature of the subject.
The Linking Hearts Installation would be installed under the 40 meters of covered walkway which joined the old and new buildings.

Following a site visit and detailed discussions, our creative director suggested using DMX controlled LED colour changing light bars, positioned underneath the roof of the walkway. The light bars would provide a beautifully timed wash of coloured light onto the underside of the roof structure and highlight the hanging paper hearts. In addition to this, the lighting installation would provide various scene changes programmed to create movement and life to the art installation.

St Christopher’s loved the concept and so the team organised a mock-up to test the event lighting and various ways of hanging the linked hearts. Everybody was excited and inspired by the mock-up results. The process had concentrated the team on exactly what was required for the installation to be completed and the duration to install 50,000 linked hearts. Over the coming few weeks, volunteers and staff set about the task of linking the thousands of hearts together to form a chain of approximately 10 miles long.

“These memories create unbreakable
links to those we love”

Installation of the lighting and the hanging of the hearts was completed in one and a half days. After which the lighting was carefully choreographed to add movement and life. This was achieved by changing the colour of light and then slowly letting the colour change move in a wave along the length of the walkway. The colour change was set to reflect the corporate colours of St Christopher’s and the NHS.

The combined effects of the linked hearts swaying softly in the wind and the lighting gave the art installation a beautiful sense of life. It was so rewarding to learn that relatives, family members and friends were connecting with the art installation of remembrance in a tactile and thoughtful manner, some even finding their messages amongst the thousands. This is evident from the positive comments left on social media and we are happy we could play our part in their experience. 

Other Art Lighting Projects You Might Like to View

Click on the thumbnail images of the page to view lighting design projects or related links.

back to news