Vox Lumens is an installation developed by Heather Burnett-Rose and Anne Rush in 2010. It was first shown in Nelson during the Arts Festi-val.

The installation plays with notions of space, light, sound, and time; creating a unique meditational and mesmerising experience for the visitor.

The seamless five screen wrap-around film projections com-bine with the five point sur-round soundtrack to create an immersive environ-ment that is transporting and transcendent, scattering lightand sound throughout thespace.

The chrysalis-shaped, shrouded ‘cocoons’ imply both rebirth and death, with a paradoxically ominous and soothing quality. The low lying ‘pods’ create soft, comfortable ‘cradles’ and a sense of individual space within the public exhibition.

The exquisite metal and crys-tal hanging sculptures have kinetic qualities, calling the eye to them, simultaneously refracting light all over the space. The sculptures are designed to allow the projected film to move through them, or bounce off them, giv-ing them a multi-dimensional quality and creating a magical element.

The walls, floors, and ceilings are also ‘shrouded’ in soft, semi-opaque, seamless mate-rial, creating a sense of being suspended in space, with a visually disorienting field of vision much like a photogra-phy studio’s ‘infinity curve’.

VOX LUMENS

Please click to watch 9 min film excerpt of Vox Lumens Installation

Burnett-Rose performed, produced, and edited the music and film. Rush and Burnett-Rose developed spatial aspects of the installation together, with Rush creating the kinetic and mesh sculptures, and Burnett-Rose concentrating on the ‘pods’ and shrouded cocoons.

A permanent resident of New Zealand, but from the UK originally, Burnett-Rose has previously exhibited her work widely in Europe and around the world, in institutions such as the Frankfurt Kunstverein in Germany, the Imperial War Museum and the ICA in London, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio, the Centraal Museum in Holland, to name but a few. As part of the UK Arts Council sponsored group show 'Pilot', her work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2007.

Though she has had solo shows, and worked in col-laboration with other artists from time to time, her work has featured in many group shows alongside art-ists such as Bill Viola, Marina Abramovic, Antony Gormley, Mona Hatoum, Annika Larsson, Joseph Beuys, Vanessa Beecroft, Carlos Amorales, Tacita Dean, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Johan Grimonprez, Damien Hirst, Jenny Holzer, Bruce Nauman, Tony Oursler, Arnulf Rainer, and many other well known artists from around the world.

Burnett-Rose has also concurrently had a career as a professional singer and musician/producer, and worked as a long-standing session musician/voice over artist in London and Paris, singing on major adverts, soundtracks for television and film, and on albums such as Mike Oldfield’s 'Tubular Bells III' for example. She has also worked with top Columbia Re-cords artist Roachford, Conductor/Composer Tolga Kashif, and the actress Angelina Jolie for her vocal performances on the film ‘Original Sin’.

Meanwhile Rush has developed a growing interest in installation art since staging Arum: A White Room at the Suter Art Gallery (Nelson 2008) and Bath Street Gallery (Parnell, Auckland 2009). This all white installation attracted an enthusiastic response from visitors and curators. Anne serves on the board of Creative NZ, has an MNZM, and is an enthusiastic supporter of community arts outreach programs.

Their art practises are very different, with Burnett-Rose specialising in film and sound installations with a highly conceptual framework, and Rush inclining to a more intuitive, almost mystical creative process. Despite their different ap-proaches, the two artists found an intersection in their mutual interest in develop-ing installations that could profoundly and positively effect perception, con-sciousness, and experience. Both wished to create a sense of inner space through the manipulation of the outer environment,through audio-visual and spatial con-struction. Both wished to create a space of peace, with a possibility of transforma-tive emotional/spiritual states in the visitor. Burnett-Rose approached the installa-tion with intention of creating an antidote to modern city life with it’s daily bom-bardment of the senses with images, sounds, targeted messages and meanings, and as such sees the installation as political. Rush, approaching it through her senses, intuition, and her personal journey to peace, created her kinetic sculp-tures in an almost transcendental manner, allowing the sculptural forms to unfold without conscious interference. In this way, their collaboration developed, with each artist working with radically different methods and intentions, but with a powerful installation as a consequence of that hybrid fusion.

“Since becoming part of this installation of sound and light I have carried the experience with me. It is a gift of ethereal beauty, an enhancement of who I am, who we all are. It would not be overstating it to say that I am seeing other people differently, seeing them for their delicacy, their essential spirit, their innate goodness.

Anne Rush and Heather Burnett-Rose have together created a beautiful, original work of art. It would sit gently in any great gallery of the world and is an amazing achievement. The collaboration be-tween them is one of like minds.

Lying there, surrounded by walls draped in soft folds, the floor likewise, and a continuous pattern of changing light on the ceiling, on everything, I thought that if Heaven existed it might be like this. The ghost-like shapes, amorphous shrouds suspended from the ceiling, spirit angels of blue, violet and white. It is also like being in a white womb, safe and warm yet with light and my shadow on the wall, stars on my body.

The combination of abstract white shapes with incredible light effects and a complex and involving soundtrack is both powerful and serene.

This is an installation for all ages. Every street in every town should have a ‘Vox Lumens’ where passers-by could take time out from their busy and sometimes stressful day to breathe and re-charge.” Gail Tressider, Nelson Mail, October 2012

For more information, please contact: Heather Burnett-Rose & Anne Rush 03 525 811703 545 9390 heather.ellarose@gmail.comannerush@orcon.net.nz