Wayne Sables: 'I want to bring wildness of the Peak District to urban Sheffield'
How do you take the wild, unspoilt splendour of the Peak District’s Stanage Edge and transport it to a gritty, urban setting like Sheffield’s Park Hill flats?
That’s the challenge facing South Yorkshire film maker Wayne Sables as he embarks on his latest project.
Whispering Horizons is a new art installation designed to bring natural environments into some unusual locations when it is ready to take to the road both nationally and internationally.
With £13,000 research and development funding made available from Arts Council England, supported by the National Lottery, Doncaster-based Wayne is ready to start work on the prototype for the ambitious project – and one of the first places he is going is to the gritstone escarpment of Stanage Edge, in Derbyshire.
“We’re looking at doing our preliminary filming at Stanage Edge because it is such an iconic location,” says Wayne, who will be joined on the project by producer Jo Purseglove and York-based composer Nicholas Lewis.
"And just imagine how spectacular it would be if can bring some of that beauty right to the heart of Sheffield or any other big city.”
It’s early days yet in how Whispering Horizons will look when the final installation is created.
“Once we are ready to take things forward to the next level, we will be going to international locations of great natural beauty,” explains Wayne.
"That could be anywhere from the Outer Hebrides to the Fjords of Norway - filming landscapes, capturing their beauty and also capturing too the unique sounds of those locations.
“We will then use that material to create a truly unique installation that can be transported to any location from a busy city centre to a remote community venue, offering people the opportunity to see that in a climate where there is so much negativity, there is still a wonderful world around us.
“It will offer a chance to reflect on and explore the beauty of so many places, bring the world to us rather than us to the world.
"It will also be like using the technology of film and multimedia to encourage our audience to slow down, stop for a moment and observe the world beyond their own lives.”
This year, Wayne is celebrating 20 years of the Wayne Sables Project. Since he launched in 2006, his work has spanned documentaries, photography, projection mapping, and digital installations.
"When the work starts feeling automatic, that's not a mood to push through. It's a signal,” he says. “It means you've stopped learning, and craft without curiosity is just production.
"Every reinvention in my career started as restlessness I could easily have ignored. I started as a filmmaker. Boredom – and curiosity – is how I ended up in photography, projection mapping, and large-scale digital art. None of that was a career plan. It was following the itch.”