NORTH YORKSHIRE.- York St John University presents a new temporary site-responsive video and sound installation by internationally established British artist Roger Bourke. The installation has been commissioned for LUX 2008 and curated by Judit Bodor on behalf of Illuminating York and York St John University as the institution’s third annual contribution to the city’s festival of light-based, site-responsive contemporary art. The project supports the aim of Illuminating York to promote the city as contemporary and creative through commissioning internationally pertinent and current art to breathe new life into York's historic urban environment.The relationship of LUX to Illuminating York is emblematic too of the University’s belief in widening access to high quality knowledge and experience through education and the arts while reciprocally contributing to cultural development, opportunity and regeneration in its host city.

As such, an aim of LUX has been for the University to provide its creative practice graduates with a range of opportunities to develop their professional experience through key involvement with the event. This involvement has previously resulted in graduate commission opportunities for the University’s graduating artists to develop and exhibit works in response to the changing locations and contexts LUX adopts year on year. LUX 2008 keeps faith with these aims but has set itself the revised objective of inviting external curator Judit Bodor and artist Roger Bourke to produce a commissioned installation work for the city’s Holy Trinity Church. They will work with the University’s Head of Fine Arts Roddy Hunter to offer credible professional practice opportunities to creative practice students and graduates within the context of the project’s development and production.

A primary concern in Bourke’s practice is the materiality and malleability of light as a sculptural, spatial medium. His work deals with the interplay between physical, video and sonic ‘surfaces’ and integrates a range of media: video, sound, sculptural installation, interactive technologies and sometimes text. Bourke intends the work to operate for the spectator in a field of sensory experience where the visual merges with the sensory experience of our own body: of touch, of movement, space and proximity. His work always demonstrates an integrated approach to architectural space and place and he has worked in relation to a wide range of spaces and places internationally, mainly throughout Europe and Asia.

elegia in Holy Trinity on Goodramgate, York responds to the unique character of the ‘box pews’ of the church, which undulate like a sea swell across the interior floor plan and draws on the “human“ scale of the church and its sight-line relationship with the York Minster in view but a world away in terms of scale and the intimate quality of this church’s interior space. Metaphorically, the - probably family owned - box pews operate as ‘houses’ that call up the ‘layers’ of generations - a continuum of ‘appearance / disappearance’ of those that history and ‘monument’ neglect – those that are born, live their lives generously, and pass obscurely - ‘the ordinary’. The installation draws on the ‘mongrel’ quality of the architecture with its cycles of adaption, periodic neglect, repair, make – over and now ‘heritaged’ physical context as wells as on the ambient sense of layered histories, celebrating the trace of ‘ordinary intimate’ lives and the passages of generations: at once, celebratory and elegiac.