Large-scale sound, light and projection event
Commissioned by Right Up Our Street for DN Festival of Light 2021
The Crossing Place is a large-scale multi-media installation created specially for the DN Festival of Light. It was shown inside Doncaster Minster during November 2021 and a scaled-down adaption of the work was also shown for a longer period at the Danum Museum, alongside a selection of the museum’s taxidermy specimens. (Link to walk-around video of this exhibition at the Danum).
The Crossing Place is inspired by Doncaster’s rich natural history collection and the town’s long-standing association with wildlife parks dating back to the 19th century when the nearby Owston Hall estate was home to a range of native and non-native creatures which included the now extinct Quagga.
A foal of the Quagga was preserved by the taxidermist Hugh Reid and was later donated to Doncaster Museum where it still remains a scientifically important specimen. Reinagle’s painting ‘Animals in a Landscape or to give the painting its full title ‘Landscape with Animals or an African Scene, with Zebus of Three Kinds and Quaggas: The Zebras painted from the Animals’ depicts an imagined scene populated with some of the animals that lived on the Owston Hall estate including the young Quagga.
More recently in the 1950s, Beechfield Zoo which lay within the grounds of the original Doncaster Museum was home to around 400 creatures some of which came from other zoos and others that were found locally and gifted by the public. A number of these creatures were preserved after their demise and form part of Heritage Doncaster’s taxidermy collection.
The Crossing Place re-imagines Reinagle’s fictional landscape populated by a menagerie of exotic and native creatures such as crocodile, pufferfish, leopard, penguin, snake and swan. Using 3D laser scanning technology, digital 3D modeling, projection and lighting effects we have drawn on the museum’s rich taxidermy collection to create a landscape of fantastical creatures where predators and prey exist peacefully side by side as luminous bodies of light.
The soundscape developed specifically for the film weaves together sounds recorded at the Yorkshire Wildlife Park with musical elements composed and mixed to express the movement and potential dramas playing out between the different creatures.
With special thanks to Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council, Heritage Doncaster, Doncaster Minster, Yorkshire Wildlife Park and DLCT for all their support in the development of this work.
Link to further information and images
Credits: AV Technical support: QED; Lidar scanning undertaken by OR3D
Landscape with Animals (An African Scene) by the artist Ramsay Richard Reinagle
