The renovated space enables museum experts, who worked with exhibit designers Haley Sharpe Design Ltd of Leicester and lighting designers DJW of Beaulieu, to ensure acceptable levels of light and humidity in order to display such precious documents safely.
Lighting designer David Willrich, of DJW, said that one of the main considerations behind designing the lighting for The Easter Rising: Understanding 1916 was observing conservation light level requirements whilst providing sufficient levels of light to enable the individual exhibits and artefacts to be viewed comfortably by visitors. The brief also required him to keep heat output and energy requirements to a minimum. To this end, David selected a range of lighting fixtures from Lighting Services Inc (LSI), a company whose products he has used many times in the past.
Willrich explained: "The exhibit area has no dimming facilities, so in order for us to achieve a good balance between the lighting on the graphics and the display cases, which were lit to 50 lux or less, all the display fixtures had to be capable of taking accessories, such as filters.
"The majority of fixtures used were MHLN16, which was designed specifically to take the award-winning BriteSpot ES50, the most compact metal halide reflector lamp available for general lighting. This high output 35W lamp has a compact 51mm diameter and boasts a CRI of more than 90 and a 6000-hour life. LSI's MHLN16 fixture also takes a wide range of AAA size accessories, so was ideal for our use."
To provide soft general lighting for some of the show cases, David selected LSI's TP36 fixture, a specification grade medium and long throw luminaire which takes all the low voltage PAR36 and AR111 lamps. The TP36 has an internal cartridge which holds a complete range of up to three C size accessories such as spread lenses, colour filters and so on, plus it offers the theatrical potential of external accessories such as barn doors, hoods and gels.
The star performer, however, was the BP75 from LSI. Willrich explains: "The exhibition has some very strong content, and the designers wanted a contrast on some of the graphics. The BP75 offers the facility of gobo projection, which we used to provide texture, plus it incorporates framing shutters, giving us precise control of the light beam. This enabled us to focus very tightly on particular graphics, and we used the effect to frame some important biographies."
(Lee Baldock)
