Ross Ashton from E/T/C London created a series of three projection art works for the 2009 St. Andrews Festival, a three-day event. Two of the three works were projected on the ruins of the Cathedral of St. Andrews in Scotland, a structure that took 150 years to build and was completed in 1318. For those two works, Ashton projected large moving images onto the altar area and one on the cloister walls of the ruins for the cathedral. The third project was projected onto St. Mary's Quadrangle, part of St Andrews' university.
Event organizer Rob Murray-Brown asked Ashton, who had worked on a smaller-scale projection the year before, to create an illumination specifically about St. Andrews, to be staged in the city. Ashton also worked with input from The University of St. Andrews and Historic Scotland.
The themes of the projections included legends and myths surrounding St. Andrew and the monk Regulus (St. Rule), who was the keeper of St. Andrew's bones in Patras, Greece, where the saint was crucified. Regulus had a dream telling him to take the bones, travel and form a church where he landed, and according to the legend, he survived a shipwreck in the harbor nearby.
The cathedral was built atop a cliff by the sea, and since St. Andrew was also a fisherman, Ashton also chose maritime images for part of the show. His separate but related storyboards for the three different locations also differed greatly in size and shape.
The Altar is a twin tower with the remains of the stained glass windows above, and the projection was about 13 meters wide and 30 meters tall. This was achieved using a PIGI 6K machine with a double rotating scroller. The work was titled Via Caeli (By Way of Heaven).
The Cloister wall projection, Via Maris (By Way of the Sea) was 60 meters long and 10 meters high, and composed from three PIGIs with double rotating scrollers.
As with the Altar, some masking was required to fit the projections around the arches and the holes in the ruins' walls, which had once been windows.
The St. Mary's Quadrangle piece was called Origin and measured 20 meters wide by 15 meters tall, created with one cross-fading pair of PIGIs.
The projectors were all enclosed in weatherized hides supplied by E/T/C London, which protected the gear from windy, wet weather.
Each 15-minute show ran as a loop for three hours each evening of the Festival, with all shows programmed by Karen Monid using an OnlyCue PC based system.
Ashton worked on the project on and off for close to a year, conducting site visits, meetings and research. He and Paul Chatfield then spent four weeks creating all the images and compiling them as PIGI artwork.
"It was a great privilege to be asked to work on this project to honor Scotland's patron saint in such an amazing location," said Ashton. "There were many technical and imaginative challenges in producing an engaging, informative and fun show."
