A collaboration with Elaine Buckholtz, A Telling of the Light is the 2021 commission for the Lumiere Festival.

A Telling of Light is a Video, Moving Light and Sound Installation that commemorates lives lost to Covid in England during the course of the pandemic. A collaborative work by Elaine Buckholtz and Ian Winters (working as Nighthouse Studios), A Telling was commissioned by the 2021 Lumiere Festival.

The operative concept behind this work is the magnitude of loss and specifically, the loss of breath. At the heart of the work are video recordings of breath shared by community members that are transformed into over 135,000 moving breath images that accumulate and ascend the Penshaw Monument over the 4 day duration of the installation. Through a veil of mist and moving light these lives lost will rise up slowly along the pillars of the Penshaw Monument and into the dark of the night bathed in a quiet contemplative light.

Viewable for many kilometers across County Durham the work will be accompanied by an audio simulcast on low power radio and / or a special festival audio station based on the music of Hildagard von Bingen.