ILLUMINATIONS NIGHT MOVES
As The Enchanted Forest gears up for its 14th year of lighting up Pitlochry, David Pollock fi nds that Edinburgh is also preparing for some nocturnal drama this autumn 30 THE LIST 18 Sep–16 Oct 2014
F or over a decade now, Faskally Wood has been drawing visitors from far and wide to see it spectacularly lit up and transformed into The Enchanted Forest. Even after Forestry Commission Scotland decided to stop putting on the event, a group of locals took it over in 2009. Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden is hoping to emulate their success as it inaugurates its own outdoor lighting festival, Night in the Garden.
‘We’ve tried very hard to approach this as an art project,’ says Malcolm Innes, joint lighting designer of Night in the Garden alongside Euan Winton. Both are design and digital arts lecturers at Napier University, which is working on the project with support from the Scottish Funding Council. ‘It’s quite common for these events to be spectacles i lled with l ashy things. There will be elements of that, but this will be slightly more sober; we want it to work on lots of levels and lots of scales.’
The project has been long in the devising. ‘This is something the Botanics has been considering for a number of years,’ says Heather Jackson, director of enterprise at the Royal Botanic Garden. ‘We came up with this idea from visitor comments about the possibility of
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