Working with Cadw, Wide Sky Design has completed the first of a number of new exhibits at Caerphilly Castle. As visitors enter the Inner East Gatehouse history comes to life before their very eyes. The fabric of the castle rumbles and shakes as chains begin to lift the mighty weight of a portcullis. The portcullis appears through an opening in the floor and rises up the wall right in front of them. Horses gallop through the archway below, then suddenly the portcullis drops back through the floor and bangs into place to protect the castle once more.

Working with CADW and renowned local artist Jessica Lloyd Jones, Wide Sky Design has completed a new European funded project to improve the visitor experience at Conwy Castle.

The project is an imaginative art intervention that provides a sensory engagement with moving image, light and sound. An old fireplace in the Chapel Tower is brought to life with a projection of flames revealing insights into medieval life. The artwork encourages visitors to explore and discover the Castle in a new way and imagine what life there was like.

CADW have a section on their web site dedicated to interpretation. You can find out more about this project here.

Wide Sky Design has completed a new audio-visual installation for the National Trust on Reliance Barge, Dapdune Wharf. Evoking the atmosphere of life on a 20th century Wey barge is quite a challenge in a confined space. Soundscapes, including archive interviews and a novel projection system has delivered a fresh approach to the interpretation at this site. The end result is a captivating experience where memories absorbed by the barge throughout its lifetime appear to ‘seep’ back out of its very fabric.

Hugh Dennis recently opened the new ‘Lime & Ice’ exhibition at Sutton Bank, part of the fabulous North York Moors National Park. Wide Sky Design delivered three interactives enabling visitors to explore the diverse history of Sutton Bank and the surrounding area. Using our ever popular RFID technology to turn beautifully crafted replica artifacts into an integral part of the experience visitors explore millions of years of geology and thousands of years of human habitation. The interactives are all driven by our content management system enabling the visitor centre staff to add new content and new objects.

For those visitors with artistic ambitions there is also the chance to create their own Turner painting and have it emailed to them as a souvenir of their visit.

Photo provided courtesy of The Northern Echo.