This work was part of the first Christmas Lights commission by the Southbank Centre. I was contacted by Ralph Rugoff in September 2006 and asked to propose a scheme for the areas around the Festival Hall. Given that the Royal Festival Hall was a building site while the restoration process continued, I decided to work with some of the moveable elements on site rather than the building itself. I selected a number of objects from the site - two concrete mixers, a wheelie bin, two steel barrels and a number of old palets - took them to my studio and adapted them there. Each object was modified to house different forms of coloured light and then put back on site among the other machinery, materials and debris. As a result a number of objects that we might normally overlook, in a place that we might also usually overlook, became vibrant, glowing, colourful and highly visible, at least for a short while.
David Batchelor, 2006

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