London Design Festival Void

In the basement of Collins Music Hall for London Design Festival, VOID visitors were part of an immersive experience, travelling through a series of large-scale projections that showcased the expanded space inside Mozambican rubies and Zambian emeralds from Gemfields’ mines.

We were commissioned by photographer Dan Tobin Smith, to prototype and fabricate 4 air tight smoke boxes, for video to be projected through, allowing the coloured lights to flicker on a 3-dimensional surface. This mimics how the occlusions are suspended in the gems themselves. With the use of a one way mirror, the images were also reflected onto large white screens, suspended from the ceiling.

VOID has been built in a way so that it can travel easily and be resurrected in other indoor or outdoor locations. The metal frames were designed to pack into bespoke flight-cases for ease of transport. Paying attention to the materials used for the centre stage, we’ve made sure that it can travel to other countries that have import prohibitions on certain woods, such as the USA.

As well as the main hall installation, we were responsible for organising the security gem cases. These were hired, but additional sections had to be fabricated to extend the tops to the ceiling. These were wrapped in a vinyl print, to make them look like concrete pillars that matched with the buildings structure.