TUNGSTEN REQUIEM

TUNGSTEN REQUIEM is a light installation that celebrates both the life of the Tungsten lightbulb and mourns it’s passing from this world.

A eulogy to one of the defining inventions of the 19th Century that lit the lives and homes and lit the world of the 20th Century.

The Tungsten lightbulb was a humble and simple invention that was easily and cheaply made and easily and cheaply disposed of, or recycled, and yet the light it produced was of the finest quality that the much more modern, complex and costly replacements for it still struggle to reproduce.

Energy made visible in a tiny glowing piece of wire that has the equivalent beauty and power to mesmerise that for thousands of years was found in the flickering and glowing embers of a fire.

TUNGSTEN REQUIEM consists of over 200 Tungsten lightbulbs of different sizes and wattages between 500w and 60w arranged in different combinations of size and number over 44 circuits into nine individual constellations. 

When we see the light from a star in the night sky what we are seeing is something from the past, the further away the star the longer the light takes to reach us and therefore we see further back in time, so it seemed appropriate to name the nine individual constellations in Tungsten after stars and constellations from the night sky, Castor, Pollux, Arcturus, Electra, Solaris, Marek, Vela, Antares. Polaris.

TUNGSTEN REQUIEM was commissioned by Messum’s Wiltshire and installed into the medieval barn at Tisbury in December 2018.