Lightwaves Salford artworks
Emma Nuttall / University of Salford
Constellations of Us is an immersive, interactive installation where projection, sound and poetic language form a responsive starscape. Each visitor’s presence sets the field in motion, but only in relation to others does align into brief constellations of poetry.
In dialogue with the work, students from the BA Animation and BSc Creative Computing programmes at the University of Salford will present a series of installations in the University foyer.
Tine Bech Studio
Enchanted Exchanges is a dual-site interactive light installation, spanning RHS Glow at RHS Bridgewater and Lightwaves Salford, linked by a shared lighting colour system and a live webcam feed. Audiences co-create light across both locations, transforming the spaces into a playful and participatory environment. The project explores how light can connect people across physical space—reimagining public space as something alive and shared.
By bridging the contemporary urban landscape at MediaCity with the historic setting of RHS Garden Bridgewater, the work uses playful participation as a tool for connection—challenging spatial boundaries and inviting new relationships between people, place, and public space.
Onyva. Studios
Eternal Ensemble is a work of spatial audio and immersive projection that suspends the viewer in a repeated moment in time. The repetition of both performer and performance makes for a powerful connection between cellist and listener, creating a moment of joy that feels utterly personal, yet wholly shared. ONYVA! Studio is a UK based creative studio that works with video, sound, interactive technologies and image making to create emotive experiences that stir the soul. They use music and video to create immersive sensory spaces that feel both alien and instantly familiar.
Stellar Creates
Happy as the Day is Long is a breathtaking larger-than-life mirrorball which will transform the Red Swing Bridge into an enchanting environment. Made from a kaleidoscope of brightly coloured mirrored pieces, thousands of shimmering reflections will dance across the surroundings as it turns, creating a mesmerising atmosphere that will captivate audiences of all ages. The artwork sets the stage for a pop-up silent disco where you can grab a pair of headphones and immerse yourself in the uplifting energy of the Lightwaves Happy playlist – curated by the local community and guaranteed to lift your spirits!.
Happy as the Day is Long invites you to explore the beauty of light in motion and the joyful power of music.
Submit your song selections here >
Illuminos
Taking inspiration from the poem of the same name by Emily Dickinson, Hope is the thing with feathers is a soaring, contemplative take on Salford Quays through the prism of the swans that make the waters of the quay their home, and in particular the extremely rare Black Swan that was seen here in 2025. Connection through the ship canal, the lightness of feathers and weight of cranes, power and grace, and the paddling beneath the majestic surface are all explored across the vast canvas of MediaCity’s buildings through projection mapping and sound. Commissioned by MediaCity and produced by Quays Culture.
Dashka Patel
Molecular Clouds explores our relationship with the planet. It represents the science of climate change through colourful, dynamic and engaging imagery. The large-scale projection is accompanied by a beautiful instrumental soundtrack that features the sounds of nightingales. An intricate animated drawing of a birch tree growing up towards the sky evokes the natural world, and our connection with it.
The interactive projection invites audiences to reach out and ‘touch’ the molecules of greenhouse gases to make them disappear. The artwork brings people together to actively engage with themes of climate change with a sense of agency.
Elisa Artesero
Step into light, movement, and story. This interactive digital artwork transforms passersby into both audience and performer, turning the pavement outside Lowry into a living stage. As you move, your silhouette appears in light—anonymous yet expressive—joining the crowds that inspired LS Lowry’s paintings. Some silhouettes carry real voices from ‘One Lowry, Many Stories’, sharing fragments of local lives and memories. Together, these moving portraits celebrate 25 years of Lowry and the people who give Salford its rhythm, heart, and soul. It reminds us that without people, there is no city, no story, and no stage.
Invisible Wind Factory
Positive Spin is a 5.5m high machine from the collective minds of artistic experience creators, Invisible Wind Factory and illustrator, Liz Harry that invites you to step up and receive a random fortune. Inspired by a love of summers spent at beach front arcades, it is part immersive experience and part spectacle, the piece aims to share the importance of looking forward positively.
Emergency Exit Arts
Stitching Light আলো দিয়ে গাঁথা is a textile and light installation exploring Bangladeshi women’s migration to the UK. Stories have been collected from groups of Bangladeshi women who live in Tower Hamlets, Leeds, Bradford, Middlesbrough, Worcester and Salford who have lived experience of this migration journey.
Their stories have been gathered and transcribed onto sixteen, 3m high colourful painted textile panels, hand painted by a traditional folk artist based in Dhaka and hand stitched with light thread to highlight the journeys that they have taken. The panels are arranged within a purpose-built 3D structure with soundscape which the audience can walk through and around to immerse themselves in these stories.
Laura Spark
Here reside the last living ferns of Mirchwood; an ancient mythical forest driven to extinction purely by being forgotten. As its stories stopped being told, its trees vanished one by one. Now all that remains is protected in an enchanted terrarium, a living shrine to the primordial wisdom of plant life.
Artist Laura Spark uses hand crafted models and stop motion animation to create this mythic ecosystem, bearing a message of hope and survival from another realm. The Relic acts as both a celebration and a warning - to never take nature’s irreplaceable magic for granted.
Liz West
Make your way inside the multi-coloured corridor through either side of the structure and see the world around you transformed by saturated colour. This is amplified and exaggerated during Lightwaves by the elegant lighting of the piece, turning the multicoloured artwork into a jewel in the dark.
Liz West is a British artist known for her wide-ranging works, from the intimate to the monumental. Using a variety of materials and exploring the use of light, she blurs the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, design and painting to create works that are both playful and immersive.
Academy of Live Technology
Step into a living sculpture where light, movement, and nature unite.
Triskelion is an immersive art installation built around three towering monoliths, each representing one of the primal forces: Earth, Water, and Fire.
Triskelion relates to interconnectedness and power within community. Exploring the connection of the elements, the installation will react to your presence in different ways. Touch, move, make noise and watch the structures come alive.
This is not just a visual experience: it's a dialogue between you and the elements reimagined through technology, sculpture, and light.