Well
One Thousand Lights
1997
A temporary art work with one thousand 40 watt tungsten lightbulbs and electric cable installed in the disused swimmingpool at The Royal Pump Rooms and Baths, Leamington Spa, Warwickshire
‘David Ward’s spectacular Well, One Thousand Lights at Leamington Spa Pump Rooms, commissioned by PACA as part of a programme of site-specific works in public places, used light as metaphor. For just two weekends in late 1997 Ward filled the abandoned swimming pool with a thousand lightbulbs to create a brilliant simulation of the healing waters that had filled the pool during its lifetime of use. His installation was, in effect, at once a vivid fleeting, public memory, and, as its title implies, an image of the inexhaustible energies that constantly renew the human project as its impermanent housings fall into desuetude. To remember and remind is a perennial purpose of art, and not least of public art.’
(Excerpt from introductory essay by Mel Gooding for Public:Art:Space – A Decade of Public Art Commissions Agency, 1987-1997, Merrell Holberton Publishers, London 1998)
