Beating Heart - Light Installation
Zoominescence Festival / Flying Canoe Volant Festival
/ Silver Skate Festival
2016/2017
Sculpture designed and built by Stephanie Medford. Lights and generator designed and built by the Dying Light Collective.
This piece was created in response to a request for light installations with the theme of renewable energy. My team and I wanted viewers to understand the physical cost of energy, rather than seeing it as something on a utilities bill. I decided on the heart because, to me, it represents vitality and sustainability. We designed the display so that red light would flow in and out of the heart, just like blood. We asked viewers to turn a crank and try to create enough voltage to make the heart “beat”. This was physically very challenging, and if they got tired, we asked them to push a button to turn the lights on. Our hope was that the physical difficulty would remind people of how much energy it requires to create electricity so that they might not take it for granted.
Read more about this process behind this project here.
Frozen Clothes Project
Deep Freeze Byzantine Winter Festival
2017
For this project, my goal was to animate this winter festival with a feeling of whimsical energy. The clothes were meant to look like friendly spirits joining in the fun.
Memory Tree
Kaleido Family Arts Festival - 24-hour Deck-out-a-Lamppost Competition Grand Prize Winner
2016
Collaboration with Kristi Gurski
Our goal was to create something interactive, colourful, and using recycled materials wherever possible and our final piece is a mobile made of brightly painted sticks hung with various types of memories (letters, postcards, slides, etc.). We wanted to express the connection between our own personal memories and those of the earth and the land and we used a combination of natural and man-made artifacts to express this.
Read more about the process behind this project here.
Bounty
Green Window City at the Meterra Hotel
2015
This was part of a program called ‘Green Window City’, where artists were paired up with local businesses to create a window display made from recycled materials to celebrate both environmentalism and Edmonton Pride Week. My piece was inspired by a recent trip to the Middle East, and the piles of fruit that were sold in the markets there. I made the string balls using reclaimed and donated yarn, flour, and water. I wanted to express the value of and need for having bountiful resources - in a physical, emotional, economical, and social sense - as well as celebrating the resources that we do have.
