Esther Rolinson to light up Mansion House passageway with Flown work at Illuminating York

Light will be emerging from beside Mansion House, not from the newly notorious chains of office of the Lord Mayor of York, but from Flown, a new commission designed by Esther Rolinson for the Mansion House passageway leading to the York Guildhall.

This site-specific light artist from Hastings has created a "cloud-like light sculpture that hovers above the audience’s heads, animated with delicate patterns of movement, using hand-folded acrylic forms and a complex programme of LED lights".

Inspired by the UNESCO International Year of Light, the 2015 festival celebrates light in all of its forms, from the flickering flame to the light-emitting diode. For the first time, Illuminating York has been programmed by two artistic directors, art consultants Hazel Colquhoun and Andrew Knight, who have commissioned and selected a series of artworks to create a Festival Promenade with installations by five sets of artists along the route, culminating in the Museum Gardens, where York’s botanical gardens will be transformed.

Esther Rolinson creating her work Flown for Illuminating York

Esther is one of that quintet. "Hazel has known my artistic practice for 15-20 years, so just out of the blue she contacted me to say she was putting some people together for Illuminating York and would I like to take part?," she recalls.

"Why did I say 'Yes'? Mostly because in my practice right now, it was exactly the right thing to do, as I come from a background of public art and making temporary works for public spaces, though in the past three years I've also been making more personal work for gallery environments too."

Esther was invited to York by Hazel for a recce in May. "We really looked hard at the whole of the city centre, thinking of what spaces might work, like Kings Square, which was my first suggestion, but that's a difficult site. Then it was going to be Minster Gate, and actually it was only as a fall-back space that we thought of the Mansion House passageway, but then it struck us as ideal as the purpose of the new work is that it can be put into lots of spaces."

Esther was drawn to this passageway on account of its being a covered space. "This is a lot easier environment for the work as crucially it's a very delicate piece, both visually and physically, as it's made up of small parts," she says. "I also hope that it will be seen as a very simple piece, but made of complex parts."

The "complex" aspect of Esther's work is the science that goes into her art. "If you look at the portfolio of my work, you'll see Flown as part of the 'language' that I've used that involves lighting controlled with programming," she says.

"So I'm working with two programmers, Sean Clark and Graeme Stuart, and a creative technologist, Luke Woodbury, based in Leicester, as I'm developing new approaches with De Montfort University’s Institute of Creative Technologies.

"I've worked with them all before because I'm a process-based artist and find people to make the pieces with me as it's a work of such a scale that it's impossible for me to make it on my own. I use their programming to create the sensitivity I need in the pieces."

All Esther's pieces comes initially from drawing and then using programming to create a three-dimensional representation of her work, in this case hand-folded acrylic forms. "I make instinctive drawings," she says. "A drawing comes from a sensation that I experience, with tiny components in it, like water droplets. Something with lots of components to it is like a city's community, but it's also something 'ungraspable', like a cloud.

"So when I had the invitation for the commission for Illuminating York, I continued drawing and the drawings grew bigger and bigger to three metres across. I found I was carrying on deeper into the creative process than I normally do before the programming, and this time I then modelled the work in polypropylene. "I thought, 'this is the material I want to use' for the work because of its bendy form for folding."

The sensation was "a bit like folding a very tough milk bottle", not an image you read every day in The Press. "720 of them later, the acrylic forms are complete, and doing it has been a very physical practice, but sometimes you really have to do it yourself, as you learn things from doing it, as it's a meditation to do it.

Esther Rolinson's creative process will come to fruition in Flown

"I've done 20 a day, which takes two and a half hours a day, on top of the creative process with the programmers for the LED lighting."

Esther is allotting three to four days to assemble the piece in York. "If I'm absolutely truthful, I think that's part of the creative process of making a piece, because no-one knows exactly what it will look like until I put it up," she says.

"To suspend all the pieces, there'll be a structure of ropes that will be put up by the technician, and then I'll build the work. My aim is still to be thinking creatively as I make it, so it's like a kit being assembled, but with a sculptural element coming through my drawings, and then there's also an element of risk that I can't control until I assemble it, which is exciting!"

Esther Rolinson's Flown can be seen at Illuminating York on October 28 to 31, 6pm to 10pm; admission is free. For more information on the festival, go to illuminatingyork.org