LUMINOUS Virtual Gallery on the Shadowlight Artists website – you can explore this 3D virtual space to navigate a larger body of new work and 7 new films from the Shadowlight Artists. This Luminous Virtual Gallery is launched in partnership with Together! 2020 Disability History Month Festival Programme

See LUMINOUS in the real world (in two Oxford galleries) opening:

• Arts at the Old Fire Station from 2^nd December to 23^rd December, Wednesdays – Saturdays 11am – 4.30pm Plus Mon. 21st & Tue. 22nd December. (no booking required)
• Modern Art Oxford 5^th December – 23^rd December, Tuesdays – Sundays 11am – 4pm (online booking essential).

LUMINOUS interactive 3D walk-throughs of Modern Art Oxford and Arts at the Old Fire Station available on their websites. You can explore both galleries as they look in the real world to see the installed artworks. Additional content and the new films can also be viewed.

The seven new Shadowlight Artists LUMINOUS films on the Shadowlight Artists YouTube channel where you can also view previous work from the last 10 years.

Support the Shadowlight Artists – We are continuing our crowd funding appeal to raise funds for the group for the current exhibition and to support them into next year. No donation too small.

Managed by Film Oxford, LUMINOUS is the latest project by the Shadowlight Artists, a group of seven artists with learning disabilities based in Oxfordshire, supported by Film Oxford and established in 2009.

Commencing in late summer 2019, the LUMINOUS project has come to be defined by the lockdown, which presented significant additional challenges to people with learning disabilities. As it started during the production phase of the project Film Oxford, the Shadowlight Artists and freelance professionals found new innovative ways to work collaboratively at a distance. They liaised with each artist’s family members and their support & care organisations to draw up individual plans, so the group’s production work could continue during the pandemic.

Animations have been created using drawings exchanged by mail; sculptural work has been created collaboratively via Skype; dance for camera has been transposed from the studio to the outdoors and art materials and paintings exchanged by courier.

A large part of the project has become about keeping in touch with the group. The artists are particularly at risk from social isolation as their normal lifestyle and social support is drastically reduced due to covid-19. For many, unable to leave their homes their art becomes a focus to draw comfort and pride from.

Most of work presented in this exhibition does not engage the COVID-19 crisis as a subject in itself, but instead underlies it as a sub-text due to the radically different working methods. The enforced experiment in distanced artistic collaboration has in reality opened up new possibilities for the future activities of the group, offering a pathway towards artists collaborations which are unlimited by geographical separation and also towards greater potential inclusion for disabled artists if given sufficient resources.

The work in this exhibition is diverse in media and subjects. Painting, photography, animation, dance for camera and sculptural installation all feature in the show, covering subjects from a personal relationship with the landscape to bullying. Some of the work looks back on the changing industrial landscape and to historical portraiture. Other work draws on a huge range of emotions from joy to sorrow, and from humour to exasperation. All of the work has in common that it represents an honest response to the day-to-day world from this unique group of artists.