The Halloween Pumpkin Lantern Show launched this year’s ‘Festival of Light’ at the Garden. Volunteers worked over two afternoons with adults, young people and children to carve over 150 pumpkins before lighting them all up together as darkness fell on the final day.
You can see more photos of the pumpkin carving weekend and Halloween Lantern Show on our blog.
The ‘Festival of Light’ will run through November and December and will include imaginative lantern making workshops for children and for adults led by Hackney artists and makers.
As the lantern collection grows, the Garden and pavilion will become more and more illuminated and will be celebrated in a series of light up evenings in the run up to Christmas.
Thursday 17 October – Friday 15 November
Local artists will be exhibiting their work in shops and venues all over Stoke Newington and Dalston for one month for the first COS Artwalk – Colours of Stokey – Festival.
During the ArtWalk the Dalston Eastern Curve Garden will become an outside photographic studio. Following in the tradition of ‘itinerant photography’, Douglas Nicolson will be demonstrating the historical photographic wet plate process and documenting the garden and its visitors with a fully functioning photography darkroom mounted on a bicycle trailer.
The wet plate process, invented mid 1800s, produces fine detailed one-off positive images. The process involves sensitising a metal or glass plate in a bath of Silver Nitrate. The plate is then exposed in-camera and developed immediately. All this needs to be done within fifteen minutes and this is where the need for a mobile darkroom comes from.
An evolving exhibition of the work produced by Douglas will be in the Garden’s ‘Pineapple House’.
Douglas Nicolson is an artist/educator/researcher and works with all types of photographic imagery. Alongside working on personal projects and exhibiting in the UK and overseas he has collaborated with a range of partners to develop socially engaged art projects.
