REVIEW: Why Chichester Cathedral's Light Experience is a magnificent, moody, miraculous triumph which is totally unmissable
Chichester Cathedral has opened its spectacular new Light Experience, Illuminating Art, offering visitors an extraordinary journey through light, colour, moving images and music this October half term. Editor At Large Gary Shipton shares his impressions:
As a child of five, a tin kaleidoscope provided many minutes of fascination. Shards of brightly coloured glass – or perhaps they were plastic – swirled in the squeaky tube moving from one symmetrical pattern to another.
The best effects were achieved holding it toward the window – with an LP scratching out an accompaniment. I vividly recall Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade providing the moody context to one such occasion of playful diversion.
How magnificent then to witness the entire experience magnified a million times and on the greatest architectural canvas of the county – the interior walls of Chichester Cathedral.
The music is not Rimsky-Korsakov and the patterns owe nothing to the random juxtaposition of mirrors and pastel shards.
Instead, original musical score combines with the painstaking perfection of art and history reimagined.
Created by internationally acclaimed artistic collaboration Luxmuralis, the partnership of artist Peter Walker and composer David Harper, Illuminating Art is mighty, marvellous, wondrous, glorious, and perversely monstrous too.
For light only exists in the context of darkness – a fundamental tenet of the faith on which the cathedral heaves itself into the Sussex sky.
This light show engulfs and consumes us all – iridescent, beguiling, mesmerising, enticing.
It radiates the magic of the creation. The joy of art and poetry – the sweeping power and intense personal pain of the Pre-Raphaelites and Van Gogh. The ingenuity of change reflected in centuries of man’s creation of his industrialised, automated self – through steam, machinery, and industrialisation.
The Glory of God. The crown of thorns with which Christ was coronated at the crucifixion.
But in all this, there are murmurs too of the shadows which authors like Dan Brown have chiselled modern blockbusters like Angels and Demons.
If man spent the last millennia shaping tools in his own image to undertake all physical labour we now peer into the chasm of the next and final stage – recreating the potency of the mind through AI.
In the rush, and speed, and steam and haste, we seek to ape God. But perhaps we are more Mary Shelley inscribing Frankenstein.
As you reach the crescendo of this illumination – the great cathedral nave transforms and transfixes; sweeping you up like a tornado in full magnificence.
On the night of visiting, the winds and sheeting rain outside enhanced rather than denuded the majesty.
Thought-provoking. Challenging. Visually overwhelming and titanic. Illuminating Art is a triumph. Beguiling and beautiful with the glory of God shining through. Reminding us still that it endures. He lives. Always. Warning us. Beware, too.
Chichester Cathedral Light Experience: Illuminating Art runs from Friday 23 to Saturday 31 October 2026, with sessions from 5.30pm to 8.30pm. Tickets cost £13 per adult, £9 per child, £36 for a family of four and under 5s go free.Tickets are available at ChichesterCathedral.org.uk, by calling 0333 666 3366, or on the door, subject to availability.