Our Hastings, UK LED team was recently proud to deliver the lighting solution for a truly ‘historical’ event held in the nearby ancient town of Rye.
Brought out of storage for the first time in over 50 years, a stunning tapestry was to be displayed in a pop-up space at Bridge Point, once an auction house and now the site of a proposed new creative arts centre. As a precious work of art that was to be the sole focus of the event, careful thought and expertise from Penn project lead Emily Gray was required to ensure our lighting was delivered on an equal scale.
A tapestry for then, a tapestry for now
Inspired by the famous Bayeux Tapestry which depicts the Norman conquest of England, Britain’s Royal School of Needlework was commissioned in 1965 to embroider a new tapestry commemorating the 900th anniversary of the famous Battle of Hastings. Requiring 22 embroiderers 10 months to complete, the Hastings Embroidery was crafted using Scottish tweed with flairs-like fabrics and feathers from the Victoria and Albert Museum and the London Zoo.
The 27 panels depict 81 great events in British history that took place during the 900 years that span the battle of 1066 to the year of its completion, 1966. Worked in appliqué by hand, it went on public display but then had to remain in storage due to the fragile construction and difficulty in creating a permanent display that could keep it safe.
Now, for the first time since then, it has been released and is being shown in the new Rye exhibit, accompanied by a bespoke musical score and an immersive media installation.
To complete the project within a tight deadline, Emily had to first consider the best way to illuminate the tapestry’s rich colour array, the surrounding display space it would be housed in and how the attendees could best view the overall experience.
To achieve this, Emily told us:
“This project uses 162 meters of Osram LF1200-G3-930 LED tape inserted into a 45° aluminium extrusion, mounted at the top and bottom of each tapestry using brackets. The LED tape, made in Italy, has a lumen output of 1200 lumens per meter, creating a high lux level on the surface of the tapestries, turning each tapestry into a focal point.
A colour temperature of 3000K (warm white) was selected after a mockup. We used an LED tape of CRI 90, this high colour rendering index was necessary to render the colours in the tapestry with excellent colour reproduction and display them to their full potential. As with lighting any work of art, a high colour rendering and quality LED chip is of key importance, particularly to make reds vibrant.
The linear nature of the LED tape in the 45° LEDAL11 Penn-Elcom extrusion, cut to bespoke length by the Penn LED team, allowed for each tapestry to be precisely framed by the distribution of light with no spill into the surrounding area. A diffuser in front of the LED tape ensured no spotting or glare from the LED chips.
The LED tape is being dimmed with 100W Ecopac leading edge drivers using PWM technology, giving the curator some flexibility to change the light levels depending on the event”.
The success of the event tells us that Emily’s hard work certainly paid off with the Hastings Observer’s news coverage very positive indeed!
