In 1950 Illuminos’s Grandfather, Bob Peddie, opened a chocolate shop at 191 Blackburn Road, Accrington, using secret recipes from his friend the Swiss Chocolatiers Marius Matti and Henry Clottu.
Clottu’s chocolate shop stood proudly in Blackpool, supplying the Savoy Hotel, and the shop brought moments of delight and joy to all through the many cardboard boxes of confectionary wonders to be discovered in the shop window.
Now 75 years later, in a magical installation Peddie’s Chocolate Shop returns Clottu’s magic to Blackpool in a unique collaboration with the Cardboard Box Company and Festival of Making. Step inside the shop as boxes come alive with the creation of confectionary and wondrous tales. Like something from a fairy story, watch out for chocolate elves who, like the shoemaker story are hard at work in the shop.
Chocolate pours from one box to another, nuts roll in icing, strawberries are topped and cast into pools of syrup. Flights of fancy erupt on all sides, as magical elements and creatures grow, fly, spin and soar. With recreations of the original chocolate box designs, and original recipes written by Peddie from Clottu’s instruction, enjoy this feast for the senses for Lightpool.
This installation was made as part of National Festival of Making in 2023 through their headline commissioning programme, Art in Manufacturing, in a unique collaboration with the Cardboard Box Company.
This iteration of the work is presented in partnership with Light Up Lancaster.
Illuminos are brothers Matt and Rob Vale, who for over 10 years have been creating visually inventive, memorable projection artworks and experiences. Our works range from very large-scale illumination to small scale imagery, but always working to create something unique and specific to location and viewer. Formed around a principal of People, Site, Animation, and often combining elements of installation, dance, theatre, pyrotechnics and music, each project that we approach develops from an exploration of the emotions of an environment, aiming to capture the essence of a place, space or feeling as a shared moment of time.
Our practice is inherently collaborative and cross-disciplinary. Wherever possible we seek to work with participants and partners to generate artwork, avoiding a tokenistic approach, looking instead for ways in which their actions or involvement can become the piece, collecting the smallest moments and elevating then to a dramatic and fantastical scale.
We work internationally on high profile events, from Les Troyens for Lyric Opera, Chicago, US, to the 2017 Capital of Culture closing ceremony with Walk The Plank in Paphos, Cyprus, and creating a vast chocolate factory for City of the Unexpected -the city wide centenary celebrations of Roald Dahl in Cardiff.
We seek to create work that is a representation of spaces, visual poems that coax the viewer into considering a place, playing with their expectations. Previous works where this can be seen include the massive Ar Waith ar Daith, transforming the Wales Millennium Centre, the five-building spectacular Light Fantastic, marking 100 years since the formation of Plymouth City, the transformation of the Rotunda into an interactive bookcase for Liverpool Library, or the spectacular 100 metre projection of hundreds of participants and their front doors on the Le Mans Crescent in Bolton (door to door).
