Aimée Henny Brown

Lamplighter’s Invocation
— 2011

The procession commemorated and illuminated old and new sites for the Point Pleasant Park cast iron lamps, made by the Glasgow Corporation Lighting Department in 1900.  The lamps, removed from the Tower road entrance to be refinished and retrofitted with LED lights, were placed near the Park Gates and the Young Street entrance to the park.

Location: March 19, 2011 | Point Pleasant Park in Halifax, Nova Scotia
Photo documentation courtesy of Mark Kasumovic.

Research + Development

Looking into the structure of the lamps from lamplighters' era, I learned that the lamp poles were constructed with cross bars for the lighter's ladder to rest upon while they lit the lamps. The ladder would almost always be hardwood, often round-rung, and made by the lamplighter themselves, as they had to provide their own working equipment. As lamps moved from fuel and wick to gas power, many lamplighter's abandoned their ladders and match boxes in favour of long lighting sticks (as seen below).

For the Invocation performance, one lantern was hanging from the light hook on the porch of the Gatekeeper's Lodge to gather the participants, while I, as the lantern carrier, balanced the remaining four lanterns. As five lamp posts were moved from the park's Tower Road entrance, then installed at the Young Street entrance, I walked from the old lamp post site to the new relocated lanterns.

The next component of the Invocation was a series of readings, performed while standing on the rungs of a ladder, in front of each lamp post. I was able to read with light provided by sulphur emergency flares, which also illuminated the new lamp posts, drawing attention to their bas relief details and newly refinished surface. The reading was an adapted text from Boleslaw Prus' micro-story, Shades, which was first published in 1885, and employs the lamplighter as a metaphor for good citizens defending against a potentially dark world. While Prus' text was written in Polish, I wanted to work with the translation myself and write into the text, so I've called my version of 'Shades' Into the Shadow; a post-mortem collaboration with Boleslaw Prus. The micro-story was divided into five parts, one of the five was recited at each new lamp post.

By the time we arrived at the fifth lamp post, night was setting in. Each lamp post reading was completed with the phrase WE CALL TO THE LAMPLIGHTER, recited by the group. The Invocation itself was completed with an illuminated toast to the lamplighter, where all participants lit their own celebratory sparklers from the last emergency flare.