THE ART OF ILLUMINATION

A typical museum artefact with lighting from different angles from typical museum light fittings – 'a huge range of effects can be created by just altering the brightness or the direction of the light'

From conservation to the creation of varying effects, Mark Sutton Vane looks at the key considerations that have been covered in the newly updated Lighting Guide 8 – Lighting for Museums and Art Galleries

he previous version of LG8,

Twhich covers the lighting of museums and art galleries, was published in 2015. However, as with that guide, the number of dramatic changes in lighting technology in the past six years meant that another update was needed.

There are many different professionals with varying amounts of expertise and experience involved in the lighting of museums and galleries. The responsibility for the lighting can well end up with someone who is not an experienced lighting designer. This guide aims to help people with all levels of expertise. Hopefully, though, reading it may make some non-specialists realise that they need to employ a lighting designer.

LG8 is not just about museums and galleries, but covers a wide area of building types. It is also about historic interiors, for instance, which are displays in themselves. Hopefully this new version will help the lighting designer, or person responsible for the lighting, emphasise the story, the themes or the brand of the project whatever its nature.

As in other sectors, it is the technology of how light is made and controlled that has changed so much. The 2015 version still had, quite rightly, much information on tungsten halogen and metal halide fittings, and not as much about LED fittings. At the time LED technology was in a rapid period of evolution which made finalising the 2015 version very difficult in this respect. However, the guide makes clear that they are likely to be the principle source for the future in museums and galleries, which has indeed been the case.

As tungsten and metal halide sources are not specified any more, all the references to those types of traditional light source have been removed and replaced with more detail about LEDs and all the new technology that now exists to support them. This includes information about drivers and dimming. LEDs have even changed the economics of access for maintenance. As they last so long, in some galleries it is now cheaper to hire abseilers to carry out the rarely needed maintenance rather than have the infrastructure needed for big, heavy, high-level access platforms. The other lighting technology revolution that has occurred more recently is the development of the Internet of Things, so this and the various other innovative new lighting control and communication systems are also covered.

But while technology has evolved, humans and their eyes and their feelings have not changed. Light has not changed. Schemes for museums and galleries are among the most human-centred type of projects that a lighting designer can work on. This guide therefore has a lot of coverage of the subjective and human responses to light

'It is not the responsibility of the lighting designer to know what an artefact is made of and then to decide what light level it can stand'

p The Great Gallery, Wallace Collection, London: the laylight provides much of the light in the gallery

p Fashion Gallery, National Museum Scotland: lighting hierarchy in action, with the backlit runway and

fibre optics on black sticks ensuring the fashion exhibit is the brightest item against surrounding dimmer (for conservation reasons) cases, walls and floors

© Sutton Vane Associates

p Kings and Scribes exhibition, Winchester Cathedral: three-dimensional

exhibits need balanced illumination to reveal them to best advantage

p The Cast Courts, V&A, London: lighting tests in progress to check angles

for uplighting a single figure. A 20-degree, 3000K spotlight is being used

and how the lighting designer can influence those responses.

The publication starts with the foundations of lighting design and explains what light can do and how it can be controlled. This is important given that some of the readers will not be lighting specialists. Also, where museums and galleries are concerned, there are many particular challenges – such as reducing reflections and glare, and getting colours and relative intensities right – that can only be solved if the principles of light are fully understood.

The three great variables, brightness, colour and direction, are analysed and explained. How these three then control glare, affect the softness of shadows and the rendering of colour, reveal or conceal texture, and all the other effects, then becomes understandable. Using these tools, and many other lighting tools, the designer can make the lighting emphasise the hierarchy of the story being told by the artefacts, the supporting material and the spaces.

Photographs accompanying this article (see previous page) show the lighting of a typical museum artefact with lighting from different angles from typical museum light fittings. These demonstrate the huge range of effects that can be created by just altering the brightness or the direction of the light.

Museum lighting is rarely a blanket solution. There are often lots of details to solve and often the best results are only found by experimentation. With this in mind, new sections have been added to the guide about the importance of experiments and the importance of the aiming, adjusting, focusing and setting of light levels once the exhibits have been installed.

One of the major, perennial challenges of museum and gallery lighting is the damage that light can cause to objects. Light can fade colours and even cause some materials to break down. This is one of the great dilemmas of the museum world. A visitor only knows an object looks beautiful because they can see it. The visitor can only see the object if it is lit. But that light might be damaging the object and destroying its beauty. That is the challenge of lighting some artefacts: see, enjoy and so destroy, or don’t see and don’t enjoy or somewhere in the middle with some enjoyment and an acceptable amount of damage. The guide explains the amount of damage caused by different light levels.

The earlier version of the guide listed the amount and type of damage that light gives to different specific materials. This was so that the lighting designer could work out what level of light a delicate artefact could accept. This is one big change to the updated guide. It is not the responsibility of the lighting designer to know what an artefact is made of and then to decide what light level it can stand. It is the responsibility of the owner of the artefact to say how much light they are prepared to use to satisfy their decision about the acceptable levels of enjoyment versus damage.

Technology has changed, but how light works, the damage that it can do and the amazing effects that it can create have remained constant and so are explained in detail. I suspect that the reactions of human beings to the lighting, involving eyes and hearts, will also remain constant, and all of these factors are the most important parts of the new version of the guide.

Mark Sutton Vane, FSLL, is director of independent lighting consultancy Sutton Vane Associates and author of Lighting Guide 8 – Lighting for Museums and Art Galleries. LG8 is scheduled to be published in late spring